My Girlfriend, Who Lives In Canada
by Quillslinger
Summary: AU. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single high school boy in possession of a good libido, must be in want of a girlfriend — or a pretend one. Axel/Roxas and others.
1. Chapter I

**Title:** My Girlfriend, Who Lives In Canada

**Pairings:** Axel/Roxas, and whatever else my cracked-out brain will come up with in future chapters -- that's right, it's a WiP.

**Disclaimer:** I actually don't know the full details of KH ownership, but whatever, it's not mine. Just a heads-up, this document sits in my hard-drive under the title Cliche #5, so you should probably know what you're getting into. Perhaps I should also name chapters after song titles...

**Summary:** Roxas has a pretend girlfriend. Don't look at me like that. (Completely, shamelessly AU)

* * *

**My Girlfriend, Who Lives In Canada**

**I.**

Olette had some sort of weird notion that being their closest-cum-only female friend automatically made her den mother to all of them, so when she marched into the cafeteria during Monday lunch and threw her bag down into an empty seat with an ominous thud, an overpowering sense of import immediately settled around the table.

"So, it has come to my attention that not one of you have procured dates for the Junior Prom," she announced, propping herself up against the table edge to peer down at her subjects. "And seeing as said Prom is only in three weeks and I'm on the planning committee, this poses a problem."

She finished with a flourish and looked around imperiously, breathless with excitement. In the ensuing silence, Pence physically leaned away from Olette in horror, Hayner did not appear to notice her at all, and Roxas laid down his book.

Unfortunately, this put him in direct line of eye contact with Olette, who seized on this chance to say, "Especially _you_, Roxas. You should have told me if you were having trouble finding someone—I would have set you up!"

"Uh," said Roxas, sounding squeaky. "That's—thoughtful of you, Olette, but I'm sure Hayner and Pence would appreciate your help too."

He made general hand motions at the other two. They glared at him loathingly.

Olette waved him off dismissively. "Oh, forget them. I've had to deal with these knuckleheads for the last three years, and even _I_ have had to become resigned to the fact that their mental capacities will never progress past the age of nine."

"Besides," cut in Hayner, giving Olette the stink-eye, "it's not like I'm going to be caught _dead_ anywhere near this place on Junior Prom night. Saturday's my weekly DotA meet, I'm not letting some stupid dance ruin my track record with the guys."

"I don't think my parents are going to let me go," Pence spoke up feebly. "They've always been kind of strict since, um, I didn't do so hot on my PSATs last year, and there's that trig final coming up the week after…"

"_You_, on the other hand," Olette continued blithely, frowning as though she were seeing in them the dregs of humankind. "You _have_ to come to Junior Prom because you've only been here for six months and during that time you've managed to flake out on _every single major school event_. I'm not even going to _talk_ about the time you took Lydia Burkeson to the Winter Formal and ran out on her in the middle of the opening dance--"

"She was gnawing on _my ear_," Roxas protested, coloring. "I felt like a chew toy for a week."

"Personally, I don't think _Lydia_ was very torn up about the whole thing," Hayner said darkly. "I heard she hooked up with Seifer at the end of the night."

Everyone at the table turned to stare oddly at Hayner, who had started fingering his butter knife with sudden intensity for no apparent reason.

"Anyway," said Olette, looking shaken. "Why don't you just ask someone, Roxas? I'm sure not _every_ girl in this school has heard about or been scarred romantically for life by the Lydia incident." She faltered. "That we know of."

Roxas tried not feel deeply insulted, and forcing a plastic smile onto his face, said, "In that case, why don't _you_ go with me to Junior Prom?"

Pence turned to regard him in surprise, eyes and mouths forming three perfect Os. Hayner was immersed in cutting up his napkin to resemble a mini-knitcap, and did not look up.

"Oh very clever, mister," Olette scoffed, hands on her hips in schoolmarm fashion. "But don't think you'll be getting out of this that easily. Besides, in case you've forgotten, _I_ already have _Rai_ to take me to Junior Prom."

She turned and waved coquettishly across the cafeteria. The jock-head in question smiled stupidly and nearly dropped his tray waving back, his thick caterpillar-like eyebrows climbing to a state of extreme emotion indicative of impending heart failure.

And then there was some stuff where Olette fluttered her lashes and blew long, artful kisses which Rai pretended to catch and clutch lovingly to his chest, and Roxas could swear he saw every single male person in the room share a collective shudder and visibly sink into their seats. But then Olette was riveting back and looking at him with her scary, scary eyes, and Roxas found himself becoming one with the school bench as well.

"Just as well," she said condescendingly, and narrowed her very green eyes. "I have already anticipated the possibility of you being difficult, and so have already consulted with the girls to come up with a contingency plan."

Before Roxas could start freaking out about things like "consulted" and "the girls" and "contingency plan", Olette had snapped her fingers. There was a loud shuffling noise, and when Roxas looked up it was to see that the occupants of the table one row over—all of whom he had failed to notice earlier were members of Olette's very extensive female clique—had turned to look at him with bare intent, eyes flaring like the heart of a fire.

Roxas could not keep the stricken horror from his face.

o0o

If anybody asked, that was when the lying started.

Roxas would admit that much, even if he was never, ever, _ever_ owing up to another living soul that at that exact moment he had looked into the shining, optimistic faces of Olette's posse and verily seen the Kingdom of Hell, fire and brimstone brought upon Earth by way of a sudden and disturbing surge in estrogen in the cafeteria.

So he closed his eyes, and pretended that all of this was happening to somebody else far, far away. He cursed his luck. He cursed Amherst for being in _Massachusetts_ but _not_ having private high schools where despite the claustrophobic environment people tended to stay out of each other's business, and even put in a few choice epithets for Olette and the mother hen instinct that had propelled her to sic girl after enthusiastic girl onto Roxas ever since he had transferred to their school just before winter break.

And how incredibly convenient was it for Olette to blame him for what had happened at Winter Formal, when it was her who had practically dump Lydia the Human Leech into his lap the day before the dance in the first place.

So, yes, if anybody asked—and someday, somebody _would_—that was when the lying started.

"The thing is... I'm sort of," he began abortively, muffling his mouth with a napkin. "I, uh. I'm already seeing someone."

All eyes at their table swiveled around to gaze at him in disbelief. Pence stared. Olette stared. Even Hayner had abandoned his mangled napkin—which he had somehow twisted into a clever little effigy complete with mini-knitcap—in favor of gawking at Roxas and his newfound relationship status. The moment stretched.

And then Olette reached across the table and flicked Roxas's ear. Hard.

"I can't believe you," she said, stormy-eyed. "If you didn't want to go you could have just said so. You didn't have to _lie_ to me."

"I'm not lying," Roxas lied, rubbing his ear. "Seriously, I'm—I'm going out with a person." He paused, and added lamely, "A girl."

"Really?" said Olette, raising her eyebrow in challenge. "A girl. Then how come this is the first I'm hearing about her? _Who is she_?"

"No way, man," Hayner said excitedly. "Why've you been holding out on us? Dish!"

"Does she go to our school?" asked Pence in a tentative voice. "Do we know her, Roxas?"

"Well," said Roxas, feeling increasingly hunted. "She kind of—she doesn't go here," he said finally, willing his voice to sound as firm and persuasive as possible.

His friends shared a vaguely concerned look amongst themselves.

"We haven't been together very long," Roxas explained, improvising quickly. "And we're trying to keep it low-key, since—well, her family's kind of strict. Catholic. They're strict Catholics. So, yeah, that's why I haven't told you guys about us—I'm really not supposed to say anything."

He finished, and closed his mouth with a click of his teeth. He willed his face to appear sad but valiant. He folded his hands on top of the table, where they could easily be seen.

Roxas, being seventeen and naturally reticent in personality, was not in the habit of lying to his friends, and for this reason a part of him was ringing all sorts of alarm and frantically urging him to quit, quit now while he was ahead. The rest of him just wanted to die, or die laughing.

And it seemed to fly too, for a moment. Pence's expression was already faltering into that awkward but brave no man's land that meant he was confused but still trying to be supportive, and Hayner looked as if he was mere moments away from punching Roxas's arm and crowing, "You sly dog!" or something equally horrific anyway, and in a fit of baseless optimism, Roxas entertained the beautiful prospect that he might just be able to sell this.

That was, until he got a good look at Olette's eyes, which went huge and shell-shocked for a moment before narrowing in determination, and Roxas realized to his vast, vast horror that she had just discovered something about him even more worthy of her fixation with lost causes than his inability to acquire a Junior Prom date.

"If that's the case then it's even more important that you tell us more about this girl," she said. "I mean, you hardly talk about yourself, and we're your friends so it's our duty to--"

At that blessed moment, the school bell went off.

"Oh, look at that," Roxas said over-brightly, "Got to go," and slung himself from the table like it was his last chance at life.

And he would have made it too, had it not been for his cell phone, which exploded into shrill noise about halfway to his sixth period classroom. Fumbling though his pocket while still trying to navigate his way through the sea of thronging students, Roxas finally caught hold of the device, and flipped it open to find a new text message. It read:

DID U KNOW THE ONLY RAILWAY TO GO TO THE TOP OF A VOLCANO WAS BUILT ON MT. VESUVIUS IN ITALY, 1880?

TRAIN STATION AT 4.

o0o

Roxas stared at the screen, and for the briefest moment, the fact that he was standing in the middle of a crowded hallway as well as on the lam from his friends seemed to evaporate from his mind, melting away like ether. Out of long habit, he scrolled down the message to find an attached picture: a beat-up pair of classic Hi Top Chucks in Kelly Green, standing over what appeared to be a gravelly railroad track.

It didn't occur to Roxas that he had a kind of spacey, vapid-looking smile plastered all over his face until he realized that the people passing in the hallway were casting weird looks in his direction. Hastily, he shoved his expression back into a suitably cavalier mask, and looked up just in time to see Olette running toward him, elbowing people out of the way and hitting them with her wildly swinging book bag.

"Come on, Roxas," Olette said, grabbing his arm as she finally caught up with him. "Just tell me something, _anything_ about your girlfriend. Like, what's her hair color, for example."

Roxas took one last glance at the text message, blinking on the bright blue screen. TRAIN STATION AT 4.

"Red," he said absently, snapping his phone shut. "Her hair is red."

The old Amherst train station was a small one-storey building, all red-brick walls and dark green paint on the doors and windows, typical New England. The interior gave you the feel of being transported into an episode of _Petticoat Junction_, and by the time Roxas hopped onto the wooden platform, sending dusty planks creaking beneath his feet, Axel was already there, draped comfortably across the wait bench and making bemused faces at his beverage.

"You know," he said by way of greeting, swilling the content of his cup, "I keep coming back to that crappy indie-hipster place you work at, hoping each time that the coffee will be better, just _slightly_ better, and I swear it just seems to get more and more awful every time. This stuff is borderline toxic today."

"It's a longstanding conspiracy," Roxas said, rolling his eyes. "We only break out the good stuff when you're not around." He leaned in for a look. "Besides, that's _tea_ you're drinking."

"My point exactly," Axel replied.

"Whatever," said Roxas, throwing himself down onto the bench and staking out his usual corner. Axel did not move. It was a very narrow space and their knees knocked. "Are you thinking about skipping town or something?"

"You'd like that, wouldn't you?" said Axel, smirking. "Nah. I'm just doing a spot of," he paused, and made air-quotes, "_trainspotting_."

Roxas raised an eyebrow. "_You_ read Irvine Welsh?"

Axel grinned. "I just liked the movie."

Roxas made an indistinct noise, totally noncommittal, and dug around in his backpack until he found the hardback volume he had stuffed in there prior to coming to the station. He had read this particular book so many times that it didn't even merit a bookmark anymore; he could just open to a random page and start reading.

As usual, however, it took all of four minutes spent in Axel's company for him to be interrupted.

"What's that you're reading there?"

"_Anna Karenina_," muttered Roxas, determinedly not taking his eyes off the page.

"Ah," said Axel, cracking his neck. "Mr. Tall, Dark, and Russian. Any particular reason you made this selection?"

"Seemed fitting for the occasion," Roxas said, throwing Axel a narrow look. He smoothed a finger down the length of the book's well-broken spine. "With the train and everything."

He stared at the inane lines of text before him intently, willing the silence to reign, reign hard and long and with an iron fist, but of course it was just _stupid_ to believe he could get away with that. He could almost mentally _time_ the moment when Axel said, "Come again?"

Roxas was way too smart to hold any delusion that Axel might have genuine interest in the Russian novel, or, God forbid, ham-fisted literary motifs from the nineteenth century. Funny how that didn't stop him from laying down his book in a put-upon manner and then explaining the whole shebang in much of the same way. Using very few four-syllable words.

Of course, if he _didn't_, Axel would just fill the spaces with his own voice anyway, and possibly start smoking, and then Roxas would have to negotiate a truce with his blood pressure or risk developing Tourette's and blurting out, "I told my friends you were my red-headed girlfriend from a Orthodox Catholic family," and wow, it sounded even crazier in his head, he'd just go ahead and not think about that.

The point was, he'd identified a _pattern_ with Axel and conversations, and that was why Axel was and would continue to be speed dial number three, and the reason Roxas derived meaning out of things like TRAIN STATION AT 4.

"So she jumped in front of a moving train by the end of the book?" Axel said in bafflement, waving his hand around expressively. The slanting afternoon light caught his signet ring, and Roxas found himself following the dull flash of ruby vacantly with his eyes. "Jesus, why don't you just buy a rainbow wristband and some Fall Out Boy now and be out with it."

"I wouldn't mind terribly if you jumped in front of a moving train," Roxas said pleasantly, and felt his heart sink when Axel got an inspired look on his face and said brightly, "Oh, that reminds me of this story I read in the trailer park edition of the New York Times once. A guy was running for the subway--"

Thirty minutes later, Roxas was still reading the exact same paragraph, and Axel's reel of nonsensical tangents, unaided by fresh caffeine reinforcements, finally seemed to be running out of steam a little. He made a particularly energetic gesture, and their elbows bumped.

"You know, if you'd just _angle_ your body a little--" Axel began.

"The same argument could be made about you moving your knee," countered Roxas, still wondering why this was his life.

"I was here first," Axel pointed out obstinately.

"I'm not moving," Roxas said, in a voice that made clear it was the end of discussion.

"Oh, I'd be nice to me," Axel said smoothly. "After all, I know which one of us has got these coupons for that new _amazing green tea ice cream_ they've got down at the shitty sushi place."

He had an extremely agreeable smile on his face, like he totally had Roxas's number. Roxas would take great issue with this, if it didn't also happen to be true.

"I hate the shitty sushi place," he grumbled, at which convenient moment his stomach turned traitorous and made an embarrassingly loud growling noise, harkened by the siren song of food.

Luckily, at that precise moment there was a great rumble in the distance, growing louder by the second. A gust of wind blew past, ruffling their hair, and they both looked up to the sight of the four forty-five train rolling into the station, grey metal shining brightly in the New England sun.

"Yeah," Axel said, laughing as he jumped to his feet. "But you love green tea ice cream."

That was Monday.

o0o

Roxas had met Axel at the crappy indie-hipster coffee shop where he worked part-time. There was a place like that in every college town, and for four hours a day three days a week Roxas poured hot water over organic, shade-grown, fairly-traded beans so that the slovenly caffeine addicts who regularly dragged through their doors could get their daily fix while nursing the precious illusion that they were doing their part in supporting small cooperative farmers in Ethiopia.

It was a pretty sweet gig, and for all of four hours Roxas hadn't been able to figure why they'd give it to a high school student like him when there were college hopefuls lining down the street. But then he had finished his first day and his manager had more or less body-slammed him into the back office for a private talk.

"You have to take the job, Roxas," Stanley had begged, a look of deep misery etched into every line of his middle-age face. "So far you're the only one who can stand working with Crazy Sally, and I need another person there to help her cover all her shifts."

"Crazy Sally?" Roxas had echoed, lapsing into a montage of PTSD flashbacks—mousy brown hair, massive orthodontic gear, a troubling tendency to "accidentally" grab his ass, etc.

"You won't believe how many threats of lawsuits we've received over that girl," Stanley had moaned. "But I just _can't fire her_!"

It turned out that Stanley was dating Sally's mother—"Trimming the roses," he had explained, a sentence which Roxas wasn't going to comment on—and desperately needed an "in" with the daughter. Roxas didn't particularly care, but he had nodded, shut his mouth and gone to work, because a) money was money, and b) the indie-hipsters of the world needed their coffee, even if it put him in frequent direct exposure to Crazy Sally and her trademark come-on, "I know your phone number and where you sleep at night."

It had been a Sunday afternoon, a rare golden March arcing over the town like warm honey, and he had been in a good mood—people had been tipping, the coffee had only been marginally rancid, and Sally had only raked in two near-sexual harassment suits that entire shift. It'd been, all things considered, a good day.

And then, it'd happened.

The first thing he'd seen had been the shoes—oversized Chucks in Kelly Green that'd looked like they'd seen much better days, stumbling across the threshold—and before he'd known it a mutant-red hedgehog had been poured onto the counter.

"Espresso spritzer," the hedgehog croaked, trembling lightly where it had apparently collapsed.

"Excuse me?" said Roxas weakly, wondering if perhaps the smell of roasted beans was getting to his head, and then there was some movement and he found himself staring down a pair of striking—albeit crazy—eyes of the greenest shade of green he'd ever seen.

This fact was further expounded by having said eyes shoved violently into his face. Roxas blinked, leaned back, and the world cleared enough for him to take in that the eyes in fact belonged to a face, which belonged to a man, who slammed a ten dollar bill down onto the counter and hissed, "I said espresso spritzer. Double—no, make that triple-shot—and dark, dark, dark like the pit of Satan's soul. Snap to it!"

Behind him, Sally made a noise that sounded suspiciously like spilling hot water all over herself.

In moments of duress, Roxas had three default settings: hostile, confused, and professional. He didn't know what to make of the man standing in front of him—who appeared to be twelve-foot tall and composed of maybe one hundred pounds tops _including_ the many layers of clothing he was wearing. But whatever he was, a ten dollar bill translated to "customer", and so Roxas settled for a combination of the latter two and said, calmly, "What size?"

The redhead blinked hugely, like he simply _couldn't comprehend_. "What size?" he echoed, making a hand motion that basically amounted to flapping his fingers around. "Grande, large—whatever size is the biggest you have! I've been awake for _three days_ burning those documents."

Slowly, Roxas stepped away from the counter, silently crossing out "hyper" from his mental assessment and replacing it with "bona fide psycho".

Nevertheless, he practiced his zen, took great deliberation in taking down the order, getting the change, and finally, pushing the humongous triple-shot espresso carefully across the counter, like an offering to a mouthy, anorexic god garbed bizarrely in Harajuku fashion.

The redhead grabbed for the cup, took a giant quaff, and immediately choked on it.

"What the hell?" he yelled, wiping his mouth on one overlong sleeve. "Blondie, this coffee is total _shit_! What the fuck did you put in it—_cat piss_?"

Roxas blinked—and, for no reason, it was like someone in there had amped up the hostility.

He narrowed his eyes in warning, and said, voice icy, "Actually, _sir_, all of the coffee we sell here is one hundred percent organic and--"

"—and one hundred percent made from pure golden crap," said the redhead, smirking around the paper cup—from which he was _still drinking_. "I'll bet that's why they hire grade-schoolers like you to sell it, since you're too young to drink coffee anyway, right?"

Roxas thought briefly about wrapping his fingers around the redhead's long, spindly neck and squeezing as hard as he could. The shop was fairly crowded, full of potential witnesses, but he was sure everybody would understand.

There was no point in losing his cool, reasoned his better half. After all, the coffee they sold _was_ shit, and even though four in the afternoon on a Sunday was a bit too early for the weirdoes to start crawling out of the woodwork, Roxas was a rational person, he could take ten dollars and—

And that was the exact moment the redhead reached over the cashier, dipped his hand in the tip jar, and extracted a dollar bill without so much as batting an eye—saying, "Well, since I received shitty service, I think it's only right that I take _this_ for compensation."

Roxas saw red. "Alright. That's it."

The espresso cup hit the floor, splashing the foot of the counter. In his peripheral vision, Roxas could see people in the shop whipping around to look at them, expression oddly glazed over, and Sally was warbling something incoherent in the background, but none of that seemed to register as he clamped one hand around the redhead's wrist and dragged him like a ragdoll out of the shop in complete and total rage blackout.

Once they had reached the relative safety of the streets, Roxas pinwheeled around and body-checked his companion into a tree.

"Listen, you," he snarled, baring his teeth.

The redhead stared, seemingly at a loss for words.

"Don't ever do that again," Roxas ground out carefully. "I don't care who you think you are—if you _ever_ pull that shit in my workplace again, I am going to _throw it down_."

Even in his head, the threat sounded ridiculous—sure, the man might look like he had an eating disorder and weighed 30 lbs. with a wet t-shirt, but he was still a full-grown adult who basically towered over Roxas and at any moment now was going to realize that his back was getting deeply intimate with some serious oak. Any moment now, he was going to receive a claw to the guts, and Roxas mentally steeled himself, braced for impact.

Which never came.

Instead of retaliating or even trying very hard to free himself, the redhead just limply allowed himself to be manhandled as he blinked slowly and regarded Roxas through heavy-lidded eyes, like Roxas was some strange tiny wonder that he had just laid eye on. After a moment, Roxas began to feel mildly self-conscious under the close scrutiny, and releasing his grasp, stepped away from his captive with a little too much haste for dignity.

"Is that understood?" he said feebly, at a reassuring three-step distance, although without the blurring rage his voice sadly didn't hold the same dangerous edge.

"Loud and clear," drawled the redhead—and had this guy always had a voice like that, all silky and low and weird? "I apologize for what happened back there, blondi--" he peered at Roxas's nametag, "—_Roxas_. Really, I don't know what came over me."

Disturbed, Roxas opened his mouth, and managed to say, "Whuh?"

The redhead grinned, green eyes flashing genially. "I suppose you should take this dollar bill back, then."

The reminder of petty theft jolted Roxas out of his shock-induced trance. He snapped, "Keep it," and spinning around, stalked back into the shop without a further word, shoulders squared and unfriendly. With any hope, the quota for creepy redheads had been reached and this day couldn't possibly get any worse, maybe he could salvage his nerves with a nice, cooling draught of water—that did not come from the shop.

Unfortunately, life was not on Roxas's side, and no sooner had he approached the counter than he found the use of his left arm appropriated by Crazy Sally, who latched upon it like a hysterical monkey.

"Roxas, look what you've done," Sally wailed, clawing at his shoulder in frenzy motions. "Do you think he noticed my hair?" she went on hopefully, fluffing her frizzy ponytail and staring at the door with naked longing.

Roxas carefully disentangled himself, and tried to inch away from Sally without making any sudden movement. "What?" he boggled. "What are you talking about?"

Sally glowered at him, and dug her fingers in harder, her dark eyes forming the shape of a .45 caliber. "What am I talking about? _What am I talking about_? You went and _chased the slamming hottie off_, that's what I'm talking about!"

As if on cue, every girl in the shop and a couple of the guys turned to scowl at him simultaneously.

"I hope you plan on cleaning up that mess you made," Sally said distantly, pointing at the floor where the espresso spritzer had melted into a disgusting puddle. Then she added, mournful, "I knew I should have worn the silver tube top today."

Roxas hated the entire world.

- - -

**TBC**

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**A/N: **I wrote this story as a thank-you gift for all the wonderful people who read and reviewed -- even the ones who had to be bullied into it -- my first fic in the KH fandom, **Deceitful Above All Things**. Remember how I promised to reply if you would review? This is my way of answering your support. This fandom has totally won me over with y'all and your awesomeness; I'm deeply infatuated, and am going to stick around awhile if you would have me ;)

Incidentally, though I am very committed to writing this fic, it would be nice if you guys would just say _something_ -- otherwise it feels like people are clicking on the story and then running away in horror D:

Last, but not least, happy birthday, Canada!


	2. Chapter II

**Title:** My Girlfriend, Who Lives In Canada

**Pairings:** Axel/Roxas, others

**Disclaimer:** The Kingdom Hearts franchise and its characters belong to people who are not me, who do not have to resort to fanfiction to see their twisted fantasies acted out.

**Summary:** Roxas has a pretend girlfriend.

**A/N:** Urgh, is my output rate of one chapter a month exceedingly pathetic or what? Pelt me with rocks as you see fit. I did, however, make this chapter extra long to make up for the long wait, and like any high school AU worth its salt, it begins with a pretentious but likely unrelated quote…

* * *

**II.**

"And what does the rain say at night in a small town, what does the rain have to say?"

(_The Town and the City_, Jack Kerouac)

o0o

By the third week of March, New England had hit another low pressure front, sending the weather lapsing pitifully into iron skies and snapping wind, bare, quivering trees as far as the eye could see. In the madding rush to make a half-assed wardrobe reversal, Roxas actually left his cell phone in one of the pockets of his cargo shorts. It made him feel kind of like a loser that he hadn't even noticed it going missing for upwards of three days—but only a little bit.

When he'd finally unearthed the phone from the pile of semi-sentient laundry at the bottom of his closet, it was just in time to be perplexed by the three—and counting—ALL-CAPS text messages already nestled there, the content of which had ranged from:

FINGER NAILS GROW 4 TIMES FASTR THAN TOENAILS.

To:

THE KING OF HEARTS HAS NO MOUSTACHE.

And then, it had gotten _really amazing_:

TRUFAX: MOAR PPL USE BLUE TOOTHBRUSHES THAN RED ONES. Y?

"I think somebody is trying to mess with my head," Roxas confessed Friday afternoon at the shop, cracking at last under the pressure.

Sally glared at him over a row of newly unboxed coffee tins. "Oh really, Roxas? All this from a couple of text messages? However did you come to that conclusion?"

In the wake of that which people clearly lacking in linguistic ingenuity had dubbed the Sunday Incident, Sally had entered some kind of emotional fugue state in which she alternated between being deliberately mean and palely loitering about the place. Pathetically, this bizarre combination actually reaped more productivity than the previous horn-dogging, and so Roxas had decided, grimly, that the pining would have to continue until morale improved.

"Not that I really care," he soldiered on, ignoring the darkly accusatory vibes. "Except the person on the other end is keeping their number locked. And then," he added, holding up his phone to show her the display, "there are all these accompanying pictures."

The pictures in question were, respectively, Man With World Longest Finger Nails, Man Performing Cheap Parlor Tricks, and a blurry screenshot from that America's Funniest Home Video episode featuring the guy who used his roommate's toothbrush to clean the toilet.

Sally made a frustrated noise, and stomped off to putter with the espresso machine. "You know," she said, in meaningful sotto voce, "some people would just be quietly thankful for the boons they get. Some people only _wish_ they were that lucky, Roxas."

Roxas thought this was a sign for him to start hiring people to open his mail, but before he had time to properly flesh out this theory, a customer (singular) had wandered up to the counter, and he found himself doling out the, "How may I help you?" by rote.

The customer—some guy in a black hoodie— silently handed him a cup of coffee.

Roxas blinked widely. "Um, I think you're kind of confused. See, _we_ sell the coffee. Besides," he jabbed at the winter green logo on the cup sleeve, "I'm pretty sure management will have you lynched and strung up or something for bringing our competitor's product in here."

Hoodie guy, who did look admittedly confused, shrugged haplessly and said, "Don't shoot the messenger, dude. I was just passing by when some guy out front gave this to me and said to deliver it to the blond kid at the counter. That's you, right?"

"Some guy out front?" Roxas echoed, a feeling of cold dread settling into the pit of his stomach.

At this point, two things happened, in very quick succession:

1. His phone started shrieking a slow version of Katamari on the Rocks, signaling a new SMS.

2. Sally, who had appeared incapable of avoiding a parked truck only minutes prior, made a sudden, spirited attempt to launch herself over the counter. Her excited war cry could only be heard by dogs in Bolivia, but the loud thrashing sound that resulted from her crashing bodily into the wooden counter was audible to all.

Roxas would have assisted her, but he was busy staring disbelievingly at the display of his phone, which had not only the photo of the cup of coffee he was holding in his very hand but also the message: LOOK OUTSIDE.

So he did, looked up and across of Sally, who was straddling the edge of the counter awkwardly and probably painfully, past the guy in the hoodie, who was still looking kind of confused, and through the glass plate window at the front of the shop, where his line of vision was captured by green eyes a shade too familiar. Right down to the asshattish glint.

Tall, Thin, and Redheaded from the Sunday Incident grinned ostensibly and gave a friendly wave, a small silver phone tucked between his thumb and forefinger.

o0o

"I hope there's an explanation for this," Roxas said testily, tucking his arms around himself to brace against the chilly wind. "Something other than that you're a recently paroled psychopath and I should be alerting the authorities."

"First month of parol's always tough," the redhead agreed. Then he fiddled with a tassel of the shemagh he had bundled around his neck, and smiled languidly. "Call it a peace offering. You left all mad and huffy last time, so I figured you didn't take too well to my apology, and you know how the criminally disturbed are about manners, we can't be having with that."

"If you think I'm going to be drinking something from a complete stranger," Roxas pointed out, thinking, Jesus, people are so wrong about the idyllic small town life. New York got a lot of bad rap, but he had lived there for sixteen years and never encountered the faintest suggestion of trouble—place him in Massachusetts for three months and already there were escaped mental patients bringing him coffee and stalking his workplace and doing weirdly distracting things with their green, green eyes.

God, this guy even thought facial tattoos were _cool_.

"Bet you'd end up drinking it though," the redhead said, tipping his head back to rest against the redbrick outer wall of the shop.

"Well, you'd be _wrong_," snapped Roxas. "Then again, I can see how you'd think that, with the kind of logic that led you to buy coffee for someone who works in a _coffee shop_."

"Okay," the redhead said, holding up one long-fingered hand in a placating gesture. "Let's get one thing straight. I think—I _think_—that we can both agree that unless the bean-farmers are willing to use pesticides on their trees, and use them _proudly_, then it just can't be considered _coffee_, now can it?"

Roxas actually opened his mouth to argue the point, and then shook his head profusely, because—seriously, way to be focusing on all the wrong issues. "It was _you_ who was sending me those text messages. How did you even get my number?"

"Your co-worker," the redhead explained, waving nebulously over Roxas's shoulder, "was very obliging—if not exactly professional."

Roxas turned, and sure enough, there was Sally at the counter, raptly making bovine eyes and waving back with gusto. He felt a bit sorry for Stanley, who was going to have to have that conversation with her again about the lawsuits and being a strong, confident woman who didn't need men to make her feel special.

"Don't think badly of her," assured the redhead. "She was very hard to break—I had to resort to coercion and trickery."

"So you smiled at her, in other words," Roxas said crossly. "_Jesus_."

He stopped in the middle of hating the entire world when he realized that the stranger was grinning, watching Roxas's left hand—raising the coffee cup and tipping it against his mouth, and Roxas muttered, "_Shit_," underneath his breath, even as the liquid went down.

He bit back his next comment however, because the foamed milk had coated his tongue and it was sweet and perfect and perfectly sweet and sweetly perfect—he had long begun to fear that spending so much time at his job was starting to make him forget what real coffee tasted like, this was yet another keen reminder.

"Dry cappuccino," said the redhead, looking pleased with himself. "I thought you might like it—you seem like a dry cappuccino kind of guy."

Roxas would have tossed back something searing, but it was difficult to work past the tiny heart attack he was currently experiencing. He'd risk death by deadly toxins for this, and anyway he was spontaneously starting to think that maybe this guy wasn't so bad—creepy as hell, sure, but no one with such impeccable taste could be _all_ bad. He settled for drinking his—dry, so dry, dry like a desert's bones—cappuccino in silence.

Which was the exact moment that the redhead got all into Roxas's face and crooned, "So, can I give you a ride when you get off work?"

o0o

The car-owning population of Amherst, driving home from work that Friday afternoon, were treated to a very peculiar sight.

It wasn't Roxas's laundry day jeans, though those were likely a registered disaster zone. No, if there was ever a reason for all the outright staring and lingering intrigue and annoyed tooting of car horns, it had to be the odd combination of him on his skateboard rolling (normally!) along the sidewalk, and the enormous, chunky-frame motor scooter that was meandering at an unbearably slow pace beside him, engine whirring dully in low gear. It didn't help that the vehicle kept jerking in dangerously random curves every few minutes; the driver was preoccupied trying to engage Roxas in a conversation:

"You know, a simple no would have sufficed. You didn't have to throw the coffee at my head like that."

"Yes," Roxas agreed, keeping his eyes straight ahead like _he_ was the one behind the handlebars. "That was a waste of a perfectly good cappuccino. Clearly, what I should have done was look around for a large rock."

The world was luminous for a moment, and presently, there was a loud clap of thunder overhead. Roxas scowled—as he had stood in the doorway of the shop, the bruised, overcast sky had made itself apparent, a metallic tang of rain heavy in the brisk air. He remembered tamping down the rushing wave of sense-memory at the first storm-rumble, and then a horn had honked at him, loudly, and he'd looked down to the fatigue green of a Piaggio Vespa's front shield, the glassy finish bringing to mind color schemes in the classics.

"Have you considered seeing someone for those rage issues?"

"Why can't you just leave me alone?" Roxas snapped, spinning around angrily. "Why are you still following me?"

"Roxas, right?" the redhead said infuriatingly. "Well, Roxas, can I tell you a secret?"

Roxas pretended not to have heard him. This had little to no effect.

"I have a disease," the redhead continued, in a low, solemn tone. Roxas wished the guy didn't insist on emphasizing the roll of the 'r' in his name like that—it made him irrationally uncomfortable. "It's something I've kept to myself for a long time, but I feel I can trust you with it. Can I trust you with it?"

Roxas couldn't help but care a little more. Perhaps it could be terminal. He made a sort of encouraging grimace.

The redhead grinned, delighted. "Right. Once upon a time, Roxas, I came to the majestic shores of Nova Scotia and fell in love with a feisty but petite barmaid with curls of spun gold. We shared a whirlwind romance for one sun-drenched summer, at the end of which she broke my youthful heart and married a lobsterman from Newfoundland. Ironically, the experience has left me with a weakness—being a tragic attraction to small, bossy blondes."

He said this all in one breath. Half a minute passed. Thunder clapped in the ominous distance.

"You're so full of shit," Roxas said flatly.

"Almost had you, though," the redhead chuckled appreciatively.

Roxas bit his lips, _hard_. He turned a corner, and his companion just followed him, did something impossibly illegal with his scooter to make a razor-sharp left. Several cars had to swerve abruptly to avoid hitting him, and they were immediately surrounded by a cacophony of angry honking.

"God, you're going to cause a traffic accident," Roxas said, not unhopefully. "Why can't you be a normal person?"

"Wouldn't have to be if you'd just let me take you home," shrugged the redhead, pulling over and killing his engine with an anticlimatic whimper. He peered at Roxas earnestly through the visor of his motorcycle helmet. "Come off it, you know perfectly well you'd have a much better chance at beating the rain with Rosalina than on that skateboard."

"Rosalina?"

"Roxas, meet _Rosalina_," the redhead said proudly, stroking the speedometer of his Vespa in a thoroughly sexual way. "Rosalina, Roxas."

Roxas snorted derisively. "Since you haven't even told me _your_ name, I don't think you're in the best position to be making introductions."

"I thought you'd never ask," the redhead said, and his smile was _manic_. "My name's Axel. Try to remember that."

"Axel," Roxas repeated to himself, fully intending to forget it at his earliest convenience. He had grown rather partial to Crazy Redheaded Dude.

There was a kind of awkward silence. It was broken when a fat drop of water hit Roxas square on the nose. The sky was growing darker by the second, and his feeling of unease noticeably increased with it.

"Alright, this is your last chance," the redhea—Axel, his name was Axel, it was even a tacky name—said matter-of-factly. "I'm not sticking around to get rained on—either take the ride or be a good girl scout and catch pneumonia, whatever you decide." He started the engine again, as if to make a point.

"Fine," Roxas said, to his own surprise.

Axel blinked. "Huh. Really? Just like that?"

"Yes," said Roxas, growing irate—although at what he wasn't certain. "I'll take the ride. Try anything and I'll hunt you down like a dog in the streets."

Any normal person would have at least returned a snappy comeback; Axel smiled brilliantly and held out a dark red helmet, a spare he'd pulled out from the pass-through, saying simply, "You're going to need this."

Later, Roxas would wonder if that and not the chasing storm was what had made up his mind after all, but this would not come until long, _long_ after he had found himself settling into the backseat of the Vespa, securing the helmet strap beneath his chin. There was no help for it: a normal person wouldn't go out of their way to help someone who had verbally abused them and physically thrown them into trees anyway.

"I'm gonna hit a brick foot," Axel warned, coming to balance. "You'd better hold on."

Roxas cast a hollowly despairing look at the darkening heavens, and placed his hands gingerly on either side of Axel's skinny waist. He wasn't in the habit of touching people to whom he wasn't at least directly related, and the sensation made his skin prickle with goosebumps. There was something almost perverse in the way the angular bones stabbed into the heart of his palms.

But before he could dwell any further on the matter, Axel had switched into reverse and then suddenly they were flying down the street, away from the concrete pavement and into the cold, heavy air, faintly smelling of rain. The wind whipped past his face, rolling off his skin like ghostly fingers and drifting back into the sky; the scenery smeared into a blur all around. If someone had set a soundtrack to this, it would be fey and chilling, the notes rising dark and ethereal like industrial birds, the strumming rhythm of staccato downpour.

"Wow," Axel could be heard saying over the noise of the scooter. "How Garden State is this?"

Roxas almost dug his fingers maliciously into Axel's flesh, in the way that made it _hurt_. He refrained, not wanting to be driven into a tree. "Are you calling me a girl?"

Axel laughed. For a lean man, his laughter was surprisingly deep, booming out of nothing and quickly filling up the spaces in rich, eager slices. His whole body moved with it. Roxas wondered where he usually kept it—in between the easy smiles, strings of never-ending words.

"Please, blondie. You're no Natalie Portman."

o0o

Granted, all that had happened three months ago, but as Roxas caught the fiercely resolute look faintly blazing in Olette's eyes when she cornered him by the main doors just as school was letting out on Tuesday afternoon, he couldn't shake the feeling that this stroke of unparallel cruelty was his punishment for the aforementioned poor judgment call.

His paranoia was not, altogether, reasonless. Roxas knew for a fact that Olette was involved at any given time in at least a dozen after-school organizations, including but not limited to something horrific called the Largesse Society, which made her offer of, "Let's walk home together, Roxas, we never spend any time with each other anymore," not only some kind of lie but also highly portentous.

Bracing himself, he said reasonably, "We just had the same class seventh period. You live on the opposite side of town."

"Really?" Olette answered mistily. "Imagine that. Well, it doesn't affect anything, since all I wanted to do was spend some time with you. We can… _talk_."

Given that Olette stood maybe all of five foot two in trendy jeans, the deep intent in her voice totally shouldn't freak him out as much as it did, but as he had come home at 7 pm the day before with bits of shrimp tempura in his hair, personal dignity probably wasn't the point anymore.

"But don't you usually go with Rai?" Roxas said, kind of desperately, and felt an unforeseeably huge rush of relief when he caught out of the corner of his eye a familiar apish backside, standing in a cluster of similarly hulk-like goons clad in identical Letterman jackets. "I think he'll have something to say about that, don't you?"

Olette gave him a particularly pitying look. Then she turned and shouted into the dwindling crowd near the entrance, "Hey! Rai! I'm taking Roxas home with me so I can have my way with him and make him like it."

Rai smiled indulgently and yelled back, "Okay, baby. I'll see you tomorrow."

Turning back to Roxas, Olette said smugly, "I've got those jock-straps exactly where I want them."

No, personal dignity was definitely not the point anymore. One of these days, he'd just go ahead and commit ritual suicide.

He took a quiet moment to regain equilibrium and smooth down his expression, which was starting to border forlornness, during which time Olette firmly gripped him by the wrist and began dragging him presumably in the direction of his own home.

To her credit, she held out until the school was at least six yards behind them before saying, in a deceptively light tone, "So. You have a girlfriend."

Roxas tried not to groan, so as to spare her feelings. "Why did I have a feeling this was going to come up?"

A tinge of color rose to Olette's cheeks, but she valiantly went on. "It's not that I want to be nosy, but you can't blame me for being curious. After all, even with Pence and Hayner being," she made a vague hand gesture that could mean anything from 'blockheads' to 'amoebas', "the way that they are, you were still not exactly my prime candidate in a run for steady relationship status."

It was obvious she had spent some time rehearsing this conversation; the little stress in her voice was perfectly pitched when she said, "No offense, but you're even worse around girls than _they are_."

Roxas choked, in a totally manly way.

Olette nodded her sympathy, then brightened immediately, beaming and saying, "But I'm glad I was wrong. I'm really happy for you, Roxas."

She was nearly sparkling at him, smiling wildly and shiny-eyed, all of which had the effect of making Roxas feel like eleven kinds of jackass.

"But I wish you'd tell me more about her," Olette went on, jittery. "I know you're a private person, but I'm sure it won't hurt to let _one of your closest friends_ know a few things about your girlfriend. Other than that she has red hair, of course."

All his feelings of remorse promptly evaporated, and Roxas found himself regressing quickly to his former state of passive-aggressive resentment. "I just don't know what to tell you."

He had once read somewhere—probably in a book—that when creating something like an imaginary girlfriend or boyfriend, it was a good idea to have a real person in mind, as this made it easier to maintain consistency. And really, thinking back to the events of yesterday, he wasn't surprised that his brain had leapt to that seemingly inconsequential detail. Obviously, he had had Axel's text message on his mind, and anyway, Axel's hair was one of his more, if not _the_ most, distinctive traits—it was big and jostled around when he laughed, and smelled kind of warm and spicy, as Roxas's career in shotgun riding could attest. Like a Big Red, only the day he was heard uttering that simile aloud would be the day they found his seppuku'd corpse in an alleyway dumpster.

It took a moment for him to realize that Olette was still talking, and he came up just in time to catch the tail end of her sentence, "—a nice start."

"_I'm sorry_?"

"I said that knowing your girlfriend's name would be a nice start," Olette said patiently, and gave a loud, false gasp of indignation. "What if by some chance you decide to introduce us one day, she might think you've never even _talked_ about her with your friends."

Roxas didn't see anything wrong with that, but judging by Olette's determined expression, he knew full well that she wasn't going to let it drop until he had properly mollified her busybody tendencies. Morosely, he cast his mind around until it landed, inexplicably, on the image of a quaintly archaic platform, the whistling of a coming train, and a hardback novel about rich, beautiful people who did dramatic things all the time but in a dark, tragic, really wordy way.

"Anna," he said finally. I read too many damn books for my own good, Roxas thought a bit blasphemously. "Her name is Anna—we met in a coffee shop."

It's all snowballing from here, some part of him thought depressingly. The red hair thing might have been just a naughty fib, but he had just lied outright to one of his best friends, next thing you knew God would reach his hand down to smite him where he stood for willful deception and other assorted sins.

Roxas knew he had completely lost it. Olette didn't seem to notice. "You met in a coffee shop?" she was asking, sounding immeasurably fond.

"Yes," Roxas said, defeated, committing himself to reveling in his lies and possibly a fiery fate. "_Anna_—she likes her coffee." Espresso, dark, dark, dark like Satan's soul, his memory supplied, for no good reason. A most inauspicious sign.

Olette made an encouraging motion with her head, eager for more details. The fucked-up thing was, Roxas was starting to _want_ to provide them now, like he had some sick need to add more fodder to the flame of her curiosity. His own wrongness unnerved him.

"Right. So we kept running into each other, and, uh, eventually she, um, asked to walk home with me."

And as if it was further proof that this whole thing was an affront to the divine plan, they now reached the corner of East Street where Axel had dropped Roxas off on that first scooter ride, still a good two blocks from his house because, all things aside, there was no way he had been about to lead a possible stalker right to his front door.

They hadn't quite beat the rain, he remembered.

o0o

The architectural style in downtown Amherst was highly traditional, probably dating back to something completely ridiculous like colonial times, but as Roxas had stood on that street corner, watching the rain stream down from the sky like pale, uncurling rollers, misting up the town in gothic shades of blue and grey, he'd found he hadn't particularly cared.

"Keep it," Axel said when Roxas made to hand over the spare helmet he'd been using. "I haven't got much room on here for it, and who knows—you might want to get some use out of it some other time."

He grinned widely, the rivulets of water streaming down his visor shielding his eyes from view, but the fact that they were both soaked to the skin and running equal risks of developing hypothermia seemed to level the playing field somewhat. Roxas wasn't feeling any dire need to rip Axel a new one for his wild presumptions. Plus, they had made it all the way to East Street without inciting any road rage by way of erratic driving, that had to count for something.

Before he had time to say anything, like thank you or never come near me again, Axel had raised two fingers to his crown in a flip salute, and sped away on his Vespa. Drifted down the street and faded into the pouring rain.

It was only later, running a towel through his damp hair and shivering despite the change of clothes, that Roxas found the new text message, sent from a now unblocked number. It read:

LIGHTNING DOES SO STRIKE TWICE IN THE SAME PLACE.

o0o

Axel was a college student or a freelancer or a recently paroled psychopath. Or something.

It was never very clear, and at this point Roxas couldn't remember if the subject had ever even been broached. He didn't seem to have a last name or a house or anything, just sent inane SMS's to Roxas's cell phone and wandered up to the counter during his shifts at the coffee shop, invariably providing Sally and the regulars with a fresh array of entertainment because he was very obviously an insane person. The fact that Roxas always left with him just proved that Axel had a running contender in the category.

Even more troubling, Roxas had, in time, become _used_ to seeing Axel waiting for him on the street corner with his giant Vespa—"_Rosalina_," corrected Axel, emphasizing the "r" with a dark, exotic roll of his tongue that made something inside Roxas squirm—and he really got a lot more use out of that spare helmet than he was comfortable admitting to.

In the course of being eased into the mad, wonderful world of Axel, Roxas had begun studying him—like a particularly convoluted book, something Beat Generation. Kerouac perhaps, who had written on huge rolls of butcher paper, his prose free-flowing from his fingertips, going on and on because he had always felt there'd been much to say (most drunks often did).

And after extensive observation, this was what Roxas knew:

Axel loved the sound of his own voice, and had a running commentary for _everything_. He also had the questionable gift of absorbing obscure trivia by some sort of osmosis, and could generally be counted on to start rattling them off at random, often segueing gracefully back into the stream of conversation without a hitch. He made a lot of bad jokes, and pretended to be stupider than he actually was—to Roxas's very vast amazement.

Despite being a complete pop-culture addict, he had some really weird habits. E.g., sitting front rows at the movies. The reason for which, he claimed, was because front-rowers received the images first as they came off the screen. Like in _The Dreamers_.

"I think _The Dreamers_ was really pretentious and soft-core porn at best," Roxas had said mulishly, rubbing at his over-strained eyes after one such excursion. Several people in their vicinity had given them a wide berth before skittering away, alarmed.

Axel had laughed. "Is there any other reason to watch it?" he'd asked, winking at the disturbed pedestrians.

The way he casually dismissed Roxas's considerably high threshold for personal space suggested a reckless outlook on life as well as a lack of basic survival instincts. Which Roxas kind of knew anyway, given Axel's penchant for manorexia and driving really fast and, at times, going for days subsisting entirely on caffeine and Malboro Red, like he was some kind of Mary-Kate Olsen in reverse. The hobo-chic attires only proved it.

"You keep saying that," Axel had said feelingly, pulling a hang-dog expression the first time Roxas had expressed this opinion. "Like I'm a one-man fashion wreck or something. Do I really dress that badly?"

The answer was yes, very often, all the time, really. Axel's wardrobe seemed to consist entirely of offensive things, including truly ill-advised shirts, blazers that looked like they'd been made from the skin of animals that had died and been tanned in the early stages of decomposition, various colorful, over-long wool scarves which he insisted on wearing, sometimes _all at once_, in the early summer heat. And of course, the green Chucks. His clothes clashed with everything, including themselves and his hair. Roxas was going to have to introduce Axel to a personal shopper someday; he was embarrassed to be seen with him.

But all this was made up for by the fact that Axel had a seemingly endless knowledge of Amherst's local attractions, and could make the most out of any mundane activity. He and Roxas had an epic five-rounds-and-counting argument over whether Main Street's Black Sheep or Lone Wolf was the superior restaurant—Roxas insisted that Lone Wolf's waffles could revive the dead, Axel maintained that waffles were breakfast food and everyone knew that meal was an urban legend, and besides, Roxas was just a hater because Black Sheep siphoned away his customers by putting crack cocaine into their espresso.

They got on well like that—better than could be expected, certainly like nothing Roxas had ever experienced in his admittedly limited social range. No questions were asked, therefore there was never a need to tell any lies.

And if Roxas felt an occasional spike of anxiety over all the things that weren't being said, Axel would just do something like laugh or be crazy or say, "I bet if we set fire to an hundred paper aeroplanes…" and, "Did you know rubber bands last longer refrigerated?" and it would all fall away, like the quietly receding tide.

The point was, whether he liked it or not, Axel had more or less hustled himself into Roxas's life and made his presence, inelegant stalking and compulsive text-messaging and all, something of a constant fixture.

Which was just perfect, Roxas thought with immense bitterness, as he clearly should have known that the wretched day would come when he had to come up with a fake girlfriend and Axel's stupid face was the only one that came to mind.

o0o

"And she wears these horrible green Converse sneakers," Roxas said vehemently, grimacing at the thought. "Really ugly old things— they look like something ate them and vomited the remains right back up."

Olette blinked at him oddly.

"Um," Roxas backtracked, quickly racking his brain. "But it's cute and all. Since it proves she has character. And stuff. I like that."

He knew he sounded like a complete moron. The only thing that comforted him was the fact that at least he hadn't followed it up with some hamfisted argument about personality over looks. It was a wonder Olette hadn't yet figured out the whole thing and had him murdered on the spot, or at least locked away in a crumbling tower to wait for his Prince(ss) Charming.

But Olette just smiled at him some more, and patted his arm in a slightly beatific way. Female hormones were such weird things. "It's really nice that you notice things like that," Olette said approvingly. "Anna sounds like a really cool person."

Roxas saw the inevitable coming for him at Mach 5, and was helpless to stop it.

"Of course, now you really _have_ to introduce her to us."

"Oh look, here we are," Roxas exclaimed in a loud, fake voice. "This is my house. I'm going to go inside now." And pretend this conversation never, ever happened. "You should really get going, Olette, you don't want to get home too late."

Olette looked momentarily thwarted. Then she narrowed her eyes and said, suspicious, "Is Anna waiting for you inside your house?"

Roxas bolted.

He regretted it the moment he managed to shut the door behind him, as his apparent eagerness to get inside would obviously only lead Olette to believe that he was indeed harboring his (fictional) girlfriend in the safety of his home. He was confirmed in this suspicion when his friend spent fifteen minutes loitering in front of the house, probably hoping to catch a glimpse of the elusive "Anna", before giving up and marching off in the direction of her own home. He almost, but not quite, repressed the sigh of relief.

Roxas had a sudden, unsettling vision of his life for the next however long—a dizzying web of tangled lies and deceits—and the thought seemed to drain the marrow of his soul. He went into his room and threw himself down on the bed with a groan, not even bothering to take off his shoes. Rolling over, he stared at his ceiling, the softly weaving patterns of slatted light, before digging his fists into his eyes.

He stopped clawing at his own face in frustration when his computer made a friendly sound in his direction, and removed his hands to find a little iChat window blinking at him, indicating a conference invitation. His lips quirked at the familiar screen name.

"Hey, Nam," Roxas said, settling into the swivel chair and readjusting the monitor, "Long time no see," breaking into a full-on smile as his younger sister's equally cheerful face gazed out at him through the iSight camera mounted on his Mac.

**TBC**

* * *

**A/N the Second: **Oh my God. Fifty-seven reviews for the first chapter? That's going to be a tough act to follow, and seriously, guys, way to give a girl performance anxiety. ILU. Long time.

I wanted to write individual responses to all the comments, since they very obviously rock my socks off, but I can never think of anything to say, and I do need to, you know, pass my classes and stuff. See above re: doesn't perform well under pressure. But please know that I love and cherish each and everyone of them and sometimes read them in the early morning to given myself a morale boost. Plus, another reason I couldn't reply was because some of y'all were just a little too astute in your speculations – stop being so completely brilliant, guys, I don't want to give _everything_ away.

And thanks to Dualism for, apparently, reccing this on your journal. You and Sarehptar, I stalked you guys back to your profiles and… you've given much conflict, guys, writing such awesome Zemyx. YOU'VE MADE THIS PAIRING REAL TO ME NOW. I'm very distressed by this, honestly.

(In Amherst, there are seriously two restaurants on this same strip by the names of Black Sheep and Lone Wolf -- YOU CANNOT MAKE THIS SHIT UP. And Lone Wolf, despite appearing to sport a bizarre Latino theme, is very, very Roxas. And THE NAMES, GUYS, THE NAMES.)

I have to apologize again for the long wait between this and the last chapter. Sometime in June I decided that language bootcamp would be a smashing good idea. I was a fool. I only have another week of it though, so rest assured the next chapter will be along speedily. Don't worry, I'm nearly very sure of where I'm going with this.


	3. Chapter III

**Title:** My Girlfriend, Who Lives In Canada

**Pairings:** Axel/Roxas, others

**Disclaimer:** The Kingdom Hearts franchise and its characters do not belong to me.

**Summary:** Roxas has a pretend girlfriend.

**A/N:** This chapter would have come out sooner, except for the part where I made the tragic realization that complaining about schoolwork is, in fact, not exactly the same thing as doing school work. The awesomeness of your reviews humbles me, guys, I don't even know what to say. Also, if anyone is interested in doing illustration arts for this story, _know that I will pay premium dollars or at least premium groveling_ for that kind of amazing :3

Quick revision provided by my beloved wifey, **Empatheia**, without whom I shudder to think.

* * *

**III.**

In Roxas's freshman year of high school, one of his then-classmates had presented him with a t-shirt in obnoxious lime green, on the front of which ugly white block-letters had written out the words: BAD COMMUNICATION! JUST ANOTHER ALL-AMERICAN FAMILY TRADITION. If at fourteen he had possessed the grim, fatalistic sense of humor he had since developed, Roxas figured he probably wouldn't have split his knuckles on Russell Moore's overlarge front teeth.

And in any case, the present situation would have made his point pretty hard to refute.

"Um," Roxas said, and drummed his finger on the desktop. "So… how's art school?"

On screen, his sister raised a thin eyebrow at him. She tugged at the striped tie around her collar, pulling it loose, and shrugged off her scarlet uniform blazer with a fluid shoulder roll. Apparently, she, too, had just been released from class.

"Artsy," she answered, in a tone he imagined was just this side of tart—with Naminé it was kind of hard to tell. "Is that all I'm going to get after nearly a month of radio silence?"

"It's not my fault your school's network system blew up," Roxas said defensively. "Clearly, you should have anticipated these things when you went and picked a school in Albany—_the armpit of America_."

"I thought that was New Jersey," Naminé said.

"You were told wrong," Roxas explained.

That cracked a smile from her, but unfortunately not the sweetly relenting one he'd been hoping for. "The webcam is not in fact the only medium of modern communication, Roxas. You never call, you never write—I'm starting to think you don't even have my number."

"You're speed dial two," Roxas offered feebly.

"Dad calls me," Naminé went on breezily. "Every week. _Dad_ doesn't treat his cell phone like it's an instrument of the Devil, and he's _forty-two_."

"Dad also thinks you're going to be the next Frida Kahlo or something," Roxas argued, feeling his jawline grow hot as the flush spread down his face.

Naminé's expression wilted momentarily. "Does he still worry I'm going to pick up exhibitionist lesbianism and public bra-burning from the environment?" she asked in a mournful voice. "He's so negative about all girls boarding schools."

"Just a tip," said Roxas. "Inviting us to a Valentines' Day event concert involving recreations of Polynesian fertility rituals complete with painted faces and the waxing poetic about women menstruating? Likely didn't bolster Dad's feeling of security much."

And there it was. Nothing big, just a fond quirk to the lips, corners pulled back to reveal a sliver of teeth, easy as easy. Since they were just eleven months apart and had similar colorings to a certain extent, Roxas had gotten used to the fact that most people spent a lot of time telling him that he and Naminé could pass for twins, not the least because they had the same smile. Of course, he would much prefer if they also didn't keep following up with the addendum that it looked better on his sister, since _she_ didn't have to wrestle her jaw muscles out of a premature scowl-line or anything.

"Speaking of Dad," said Naminé. "Is he still in Boston?"

"Yeah," said Roxas, firing up a Word Document beneath the iChat window where he planned to compose a new blog entry containing very abrasive opinions about cell phones, schoolgirl feminism, and possibly Frida Kahlo. "That'll be the second trip this month. He's supposed to get back tonight."

Naminé gave a small sigh, and Roxas felt a frown pull automatically at his brows when her smile flickered and disappeared. "He's still exercising his new regime of benign neglect, I see. How are you holding up?"

"Christ, Nam. It's not like I'm five," Roxas muttered, slightly irritated. "I can function on my own for a few days while Dad's out of town without causing the whole world to crumble all around me. You're starting to sound like Dr. Bernstein."

"God, I hope not," Naminé whispered, sounding scandalized. "I wouldn't want you to come after me and vandalize _my_ office."

"Okay, seriously, this has to stop," Roxas said, not pouting. "For the last time, I didn't vandalize his office. I was gesturing to make a point, and that book just… slipped out of my hand, alright? That vase probably wasn't real antique anyway."

Naminé's eyes were mischievous. "I wasn't criticizing _you_," she said simply.

Roxas sighed tiredly, and put his face on his hand. Dr. Michael S. Bernstein of 43 Lexington had an office in shades of gold and brown, filled with scarred leather furniture and children's toys and a strange quality of light that melted into the room through gauzy lampshades, sienna and diffuse. The general effect was ambient and soothing, which Roxas counted as a blessing, as Mike Bernstein himself was anything but. He and Naminé had spent most of their joint therapy sessions last year in a state of profound bafflement at their psychologist's near freakish ability to be simultaneously arrogant and verbally provocative while still maintaining an air of Upper East Side snootiness, all at a retainer rate of 150 an hour.

Had their professional relationship continued any further, vases might not have been the only things getting broken in that room.

"I especially loved the way he would raise that threaded eyebrow and announce—and I quote!—that my 'inability to deal with loss in a non-egocentric manner likely has its roots in feelings of childhood abandonment'," Roxas said. He might be having another rage blackout just from the recollection, he couldn't be sure. "And then he'd ask if I'd ever looked at you with 'untoward yearnings'!"

"We've had this discussion before," Naminé said dryly. "You shouldn't let him get to you. It's not like Bernstein wants to _maim_ modern psychology, just maybe hurt it a little."

"All the same, I think the most important qualification for a grief counselor is that the person should, in fact, have a heartbeat and not, you know, questionably be a killer robot," Roxas pointed out. "There was a reason Dad never showed up for any of the appointments."

He waited for a retort, and was surprised when none came—at least until he looked up and saw the all too familiar expression on Naminé, mouth pinched, eyes wide and almost opaque, more grey than blue. She was frowning, and even with the pixilation, the shadows between her eyebrows seemed to mimic the creases on another face, an imperfect imitation in flesh, and damn, _damn_ if he didn't know that look.

Roxas paused in the middle of his MS Doc diatribe against cellular phones, their creators, and the very ground on which they polluted, and leveled his sister with a stinging glare, almost mean. "Please, not this again."

Instead of addressing his preemptive strike, Naminé just turned away from the webcam, tilting her head sideways to send her platinum hair sliding down one shoulder. When she spoke, her voice sounded as though it were coming through to him from across an open field:

"It's been nearly a year. We all went through it. Why don't the two of you want to talk about Mom?"

"I don't have a problem talking about Mom," Roxas said blithely, and stared hard at the blinking cursor beside the last word he'd typed until his eyes ached from it. "But I'm not about to bring it up if he's the one that doesn't want to talk about her."

o0o

The night of Roxas's sixteenth birthday, he was sitting at the back of the family's sedan with his sister on the seat beside him and their father white-knuckled at the wheel. Bob Dylan was singing on the static-filled radio, and it was pouring down rain in New York as their car slouched tortuously toward Memorial Sloan-Kettering.

o0o

From the first doctor's visit to treatment therapy to shutting off the respirators, they had lost over half a year to that goddamn hospital, to chemo, radiation, the works. Over half a year of waiting rooms and taxi cabs, white walls, disinfectants, injections, IV drips and catheters. Naminé going into the center with shaking shoulders but a determined face, one freezing Tuesday afternoon in February, Dad's brown hand grasping her thin, pale one like they were locked in a mutual prayer. No use. The bone marrow transplant failed, all of Mom's hair fell out, the cancer was in her blood, in her bones. The seemingly endless cycle of remission, relapse, remission.

Relapse.

But the night the DNR agreement was put into effect, it was like all that time had not passed at all, or else had diminished, tapered to a pinpoint and vanished like the last traces of a good dream fading into the morning glare. All of a sudden, the only thing Roxas could remember was the feeling of _nothing_. How fitting, that after half a year of frustration and ceaseless worry and nauseating anger—so much anger at the unfairness of it all that at times he'd had to sit and hold his head in his hands because it'd felt like the black storm between his ears had been ready to burst at any moment—how fitting that he was now suddenly struck dumb by the utter _lack_ of motions. He didn't know what to do, but apparently other people did because they were going to turn off the machines that breathed for his mom and they were going to do it _tonight_, and how did you even begin to accept that?

It wasn't that things had lessened in importance to him; it was just that Roxas had reached the point where anger and subsequently the implication of having enough energy to be angry didn't even come into play anymore. That didn't stop him from being the guy sitting in the back of the car that night as they—their small family, soon to be smaller still—skidded away down the rain-slick highway toward the hospital that he had come to hate, or would, if he still had the strength to hate. He was just so tired now.

He didn't remember much about that night beyond the car ride, only a select percentage of the before, _certainly_ nothing from the after. (The heart rate monitor finally falling silent; the nurses quietly leaving the room, their heads hung low...) As if time outside of his dad's Ford Taurus was just negative time, not real time, slices of thinly suspended motion in film-grade. What he did remember, he remembered bit-sized details from dinner—macaroni and cheese, which he had burnt—and at some point during the meal Dad had looked up and allowed their eyes to catch briefly over the kitchen table. Roxas didn't know what that was supposed to mean, but the first traces of grief already spiderwebbing over his father's stoic face had horrified him so much that he remembered nearly being surprised into speech.

But the silence had just been going into its third month then, cold and mean and surging up like an invisible wall, and so he didn't, just stopped rearranging the soggy, blackened pieces of noodle on his plate with his fork and got up from his chair, slammed out of the kitchen. _Happy birthday_, he thought, older already.

Later, when he and his sister were piling into the back of the car, soaked from the short sprint from their house out into the driveway, he tried again to catch a glimpse of his dad's face, and was unspeakably relieved to see that it was blue-eyed and well-composed again. What _that_ meant was a promise that no one was going to go to pieces.

"Wet out tonight," Dad had said quietly, "Just let me concentrate on the road, okay?" as if either of them were intending on chatting and being rowdy. Now or ever again.

Naminé certainly didn't. She wore her white coat, the one with the baby-soft wool and high collars muffled up to her chin. The whole world was dark, melting luminous blue through the car windows, bone-rattling thunder, and as rain lulled to tears along the glass and Bob Dylan told them about crazy patterns and empty-handed painters, Roxas couldn't help but stare at the row of buttons on the cuff of her right sleeve where it rested next to him on the seat, the gold twinkling dully in the shadow.

He told himself that it was a way of avoiding looking at his sister's face. Naminé had never been very expressive with her emotions, but he could always read her like a book—wayward punctuations, the detached relationship between words and sentences—and something told him that if he looked at her face right now, it'd be wearing an expression that meant her heart was breaking, and even though he could quote Chaucer and give shots and care for a chemotherapy patient, he didn't know how to deal with that. Your broken heart was your own to bear and bury.

Even so, she took the hand that he reached over, and they nearly broke each other's fingers when the rough, sandpaper voice on the radio crackled out the last, "And it's all over now, baby blue."

o0o

Life went on. Nothing was ever lost. Even your loss became a part of you; Roxas knew that, just as he knew that a part of him would always be sitting in the back of that silver Ford Taurus, counting particles in his jeans as a dark ocean poured its endless grief over the world, and if he sometimes wondered about that, felt awash and unanchored and motion-drunk whenever lightning flashed in distance and the sky turned gray and gaunt and bruised, lead-colored clouds gathering like schoolyard bullies… well, it never became a matter of much consequence. He was so over acting out.

Since coming to Massachusetts, he'd only mentioned that night once. It'd been the end of April, sultry and humid, the night pressing down on the nape of his neck. What had he been talking about then—something about rainstorms, his hatred of them, and the words had come out before he could stop himself.

But that time, Axel had blinked coolly and reached over, shaking Roxas's hand as he said, "Welcome to the Dead Moms Club."

Roxas jerked his hand away as though he'd been electrocuted. "Is this a joke to you?" he snarled, hands already clawing into fists. He didn't use to be like this, all wired up and always ready to strike. That was something else he'd learned, having filed it away next to all the rest of life's critical lessons, like how to breathe and walk upright and rattle off the mechanics of a bone marrow aspiration.

Axel seemed unfazed as he removed the half-smoked cigarette dangling from his mouth and stomped it underfoot. "Cool your jets," he said when he was done, holding up a placating hand. "I wasn't making fun of you. I'm just saying it like it is."

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"Well, it is the kind of club you kind of have to be in _to be in_, isn't it?"

"I," Roxas said abortively, and felt like something had caught in his throat. "How long?"

"Years," Axel answered, shrugging delicately. "Since I was like ten. Doesn't seem to matter much now."

"So it gets easier?" Roxas pressed, following the lurch of nausea that had started up in his stomach. It sounded awful and sick and stupid, but he couldn't help it, as though asking somehow made the person he'd become crawl out of his own head and assume the semblance of a human being again.

"Sure," Axel said lightly. "Time heals all wounds, right?" He ran a hand through his hair, and made a 'tsk' noise. "Look, I don't know what you want me to tell you, but if you're going to be like this then we might as well take you home and tuck you into bed to make the boo-boo go away. So do you want to hug it out first or should I go start up Rosalina now?"

Casually, Roxas flipped him one.

Axel laughed, dropping to his knees to fiddle some more with the wood nozzle. "Yeah, that's more like it. You don't want to miss this anyway. It's gonna be _wild_, just watch."

Roxas, who had sustained two splinters in his left thumb climbing down from his bedroom window and was still bitter about it, rolled his eyes and said, "I'd say that's pretty much all that comes to mind when someone says 'homemade fireworks'. I can't believe I let you talk me into this."

"My text messages have persuasive wiles, I know," said Axel, smiling distractedly as he bent down to check the fuse of the enormous mounted rocket. This was disturbingly disarming, so Roxas looked away and shoved his hands deep into his pockets, scowling, until he heard, "Okay, okay, here she goes, get out of the way!" and found himself being tackled into the ground.

There was a confusing second when the world tumbled backward and he felt the wind knocked out of him, dewy grass pricking at the back of his neck. But just as he was pushing himself up and about to give Axel a good shove to the shoulder for kneeing him in the ribs, there was a loud hissing sound, and the rocket came to life, flared into the dark velvet sky, trailing blue smoke. It rose in a high, reaching arch, spun quickly in the air once, twice, before exploding in a shower of light, patches of blue and red and white shooting through the night air.

"Fucking ace!" he heard Axel shout at the edge of his awareness, and felt a weight lift from his chest, where he hadn't realized Axel had flung his arm upon contact, let it press against Roxas's collarbone, warm through his t-shirt. He followed the movement with his eyes instinctively, saw Axel roll away and into a sitting position, arms pillared behind him, head tilted to watch the show. "Not bad for a first try—I should buy more gun powder next time. Worth crawling out of bed, huh?"

"_Freak_," Roxas said, and dropped back onto the ground. He flung an arm over his face, but mostly to hide the smile that for no discernible reasons had started creeping across his lips. Axel gave him a weird sideways look that involved dramatic eyebrow acrobatics, which Roxas pretended not to see. The dying sparks fell through the sky slowly, ghostly against its dark blue, and then the night was dark and foreign again, muggy for late April.

The universe swirled around him, majestic and unconcerned, and he felt slightly humbled by it.

Maybe it did get easier, and maybe it didn't. All he knew was that it was good, at this particular moment, and that moments like this were coming more often these days. He couldn't do anything but give it time.

o0o

"Give it time," Roxas muttered, and watched as Naminé blinked wordlessly though the camera. Behind her, he could make out a half-finished canvas, not quite blocked from view by the rise of her shoulder. It was her sophomore year project, and the last time he'd visited her school, it had just been haphazard splashes of paint streaked across premium Cranach canvas—but that had still been such a deviation from her usual style of random scribbling in crayon that he had felt the need to comment at the time. It was probably a testament to the living history between them that he had gotten away with that.

The chaotic splashes had evidently agreed on a theme since last he'd seen them, however, and currently swirled open in an outward fan, blazing patterns like dancing Bohemian cloth, one end smoothing gracefully into a soft, flesh-colored patch: the proud, slim arch of a woman's neck.

It gave the silence between them significance, a tangible texture.

"Olette is crushing my will to live," Roxas said, following an impulse he hoped to God would never, _ever_ resurface. But that was how they navigated the dark channels that had seeped in to fill their life: by keeping up this bright unfocused chatter, airy pauses and carefully chosen topics. Stepping around the muted spaces where the water was wide.

It seemed to work, though, as Naminé made a schoolmarmish face and said, "Somehow, I find that hard to believe. I _like_ Olette, I hope you're not going to scare her off like you did the girls from your old school."

"Yeah, I'm a real terror," Roxas said darkly. "It's all so clear to me now. This is why you get to stay at the pretension-immersed school for idiot savants and I had the US public school system inflicted upon me, I'll carry this wrong against me to my grave."

"Amherst isn't all bad," Naminé chided, but gently. "In fact, it's perfect for someone who wants to pen the next great American novel. You know, Emily Dickinson lived there in obscurity most of her life."

"I'm going to take this time to point out," Roxas said, "that I deeply resent being referred to as the next Emily Dickinson."

"And I'm going to point out that the students at my school aren't actually idiot savants," Naminé said tartly. "Even if we are pretension-immersed."

Roxas smiled, and it was genuine. He pretended to flick her nose through the screen, and said, "I know."

He was just on the point of closing the chat window when Naminé said, "Oh Roxas, before I forget, I saw Liam this weekend."

Roxas felt his fingers stiffen around the mouse, clenching tight.

"I was in the city on Saturday, over at Aunt Gertrude's, and he was in the neighborhood," Naminé went on persistently, in a voice that was maybe a bit too knowing, just shy of probing. It wouldn't surprise him, shared history and all. "He asked about you."

"Yeah?" Roxas snapped, staring at the mouse pad purposefully. "That's really weird, seeing as we haven't talked in six months. We're not really friends like we used to be, Nam."

Outside the window, a gust of wind began rustling the branches of trees, throwing dark, swaying patterns against the blind.

Naminé was quiet for a long time before she said, "I didn't know you felt that way," and closed the chat window from her end. The moment it flickered and went dark, Roxas felt all the accumulated good feelings sap out of his body. Tiredly, he put his face in his hand.

o0o

At seven thirty-four, just as Roxas was settling down on the living room sofa and pretending to do his math homework, he heard a car come up the driveway. Minutes later, the front door opened and heavy footsteps sounded in the hall.

"Amazingly enough, business luncheons can make even New England clam chowder taste bad," his dad announced, running a large, brown hand through his sandy hair as he stepped into the living room, and dropped his suitcase at the foot of the couch, where the noise of its landing made a dull thud on the hardwood flooring. "Hey sports," he said, smiling wearily. "Had dinner yet?"

"Yeah," Roxas said, returning the grin as he looked up from his textbook. "I'm becoming surprisingly adept at macaroni and cheese."

"Sorry I got in so late," his dad said, shucking out of his black loafers and kicking them aside disdainfully. "Got stuck in traffic. Everything alright while I was gone?"

Roxas shrugged. "I guess. I'd tell you I threw a huge party and nearly trashed the house, but you wouldn't believe me, would you?"

His dad laughed. "What's that you're working on?" he asked, leaning over the back of the couch for a look. He quirked an eyebrow. "I hope you're not copying formulas into your Texas Instrument instead of learning trigonometry the proper, honest way."

"Because English majors are truly valued for their mathematic skills, right?" Roxas said reasonably.

"That's a terrible way of thinking," his father said, but not sternly. "Aren't you going to take your SATs this summer?"

"I live and breathe Princeton Review," Roxas answered faithfully. He was actually using the steaming pile of crap that was _Ten Real SATs_ as a placeholder for his bookcase, but no one needed to know that.

"Glad that's working out for you," his dad said, weirdly upbeat, a little wild around the eyes. For a brief moment, it seemed as though he was going to reach over and ruffle Roxas's hair—in fact, his hand started moving in that direction, only to stop short. It dangled purposelessly in the air for an impossibly long second before quietly dropping away. Roxas kept his eyes on his book throughout the entire sequence.

For a long time, Roxas had thought he might never get used to this new, unhinged element in all of their interactions, but one way or another, it definitely beat the arctic glances and ridiculously polite phase of earlier days that had made the both of them oddly subdued, always waiting for the other shoe to drop. He had his own—what he felt were very good—reasons not to instigate changes.

It's never going to be like it was in New York, he reflected, remembering their 1927 Brownstone with the paper-thin walls, gold-fringed afternoons walking down cracked sidewalks coming home from school—ages ago, veritable centuries ago. But that was alright, because Amherst was boring and normal and nicely pastel-colored. In Amherst, his dad wasn't around much, but when he was, he filled out their boring, normal, pastel-colored town house, and they could talk and have a lot of moments that were good.

Roxas realized he was gripping his pencil so tightly that his fingers were beginning to go numb, and became politely fascinated with the intriguing principle of cosines instead.

He was still mulling these mathematical intricacies over in his head when his father came back into the room, wearing his pant suit and a fresh button-down, rolling up the sleeves as he walked. He also seemed to have washed his face and run his wet fingers through his hair at some point, because it was spiking up in all sorts of random directions.

"I got to talking with Nam over the phone while I was sitting in traffic," his dad said, cracking his neck loudly. "She's very concerned about you. Apparently, you told her you were having girl problems."

"Uh, that totally never happened," Roxas said quickly, promising horrible fates for his sister for her evil, tattling ways. "Naminé hallucinated that. You know inhaling all that paint fumes makes her high."

"Right," his dad said knowingly. He pulled out a piece of paper from his pant pocket, and began appraising it carefully. "I just thought it was a strange coincidence, considering your school just sent me this notice about some Junior Prom or other."

Roxas could not keep the blanched horror from his face. "You're not thinking of chaperoning, are you?"

"Would I ruin your life like that?" his dad asked, his tone implying that, under unspecified circumstances, he really, _really_ would. "I was just going to ask you who you'd like to take as a date."

"Oh my God," Roxas muttered, burying his face in his hand. "I think I may have a fever, I can't be hearing this right. We're not having this conversation."

"You know you can talk to me about anything," his dad said encouragingly. "When I was your age, I was really popular with the fairer sex." There was a sly glint in his dark blue eyes. Was this kind of thing genetic?

"Seriously, I think I might be ill here," Roxas protested, pretending to thrash around in deathlike throes.

"Maybe you could take your friend Olette," his father suggested, laughter rumbling underneath his voice. "She seems nice."

Roxas couldn't seem to find it in himself to explain to his father that Olette's taste in men ran exclusively to large, brawny Neanderthals who liked to get sweaty and be bashed about the head by other large, brawny Neanderthals as they all ran around a large field in the hot sun, promoting stereotypes popular in certain gay pornography of which he had no knowledge. He was saved from having to come up with an answer, because at that exact moment, the doorbell rang, and he flung himself from the sofa, post-haste.

"I'll get it!"

o0o

The moment he opened the door, Pence immediately launched into speech, "Olette called my house no less than five times. She said to come over and talk to you about your girlfriend, Anna. She said that I had a better chance at getting a straight answer out of you, since we are—and I quote—both guys and share that trademark moronic way of thinking. She also said to use force if necessary."

"Okay," Roxas said bewilderedly. "Are you here to do—uh, any of that?"

"Of course not," Pence said. He held up a VHS tape. "That's why I brought _Back To Future III_."

Roxas grinned, and stepped aside from the entrance. "Rec room's in the basement. Give me a sec to clear it with my dad."

He poked his head back into the living room to find that his father had taken over the spot on the sofa that he had recently vacated, eating Doritos out of the bag and reading the business section. The History Channel was running in the background, and his Blackberry was sitting on the coffee table, looking deceptively docile. He looked settled down for the night.

Sometimes, Roxas found it difficult to believe his dad spent his days making wizened legal secretaries cry.

"Hey Dad," Roxas began, scooping up his scattered books. "Pence just came over. We're gonna go hang out in the rec room and watch a video, okay?"

"Have you finished your homework?" his dad asked, peering questioningly at Roxas through his tortoiseshell reading glasses.

"Uh, not yet," Roxas said, trying not to sound sheepish. "But it's just math left, and I'm going to get Pence to help me with it. You know he actually finds this stuff cool?"

"Unthinkable," his father said dryly. "Go ahead, have fun. Just don't stay up too late. It's a school night."

Roxas gave his father a once-over, saw that the line of his shoulder was acceptably lax, and left the room.

By the time he had grabbed a new bag of Doritos and made his way down to their basement rec room, it was just in time to catch the tail end of Pence's evidently heated phone conversation, which went thusly, "…yes, use force if necessary. I haven't forgotten since the last time you reminded me, which was, oh, ten minutes ago. Just relax and leave it up to me, alright?"

He hung up, and gave Roxas a bleak, what-can-you-do sort of shrug before turning off his cell phone and slipping it into his jeans pocket.

"Dude, you're totally going to regret that tomorrow morning," Roxas warned, throwing himself down on his favorite, lime-colored beanbag.

"If Olette strangles me with her book bag, you're the first person I'm coming back to haunt," Pence informed him breezily. "So, your dad's home?"

"Yeah," said Roxas. "He just got back tonight. By the way, if anyone asks, you've been helping me with math." He paused, and added, "Seriously, I can't believe Olette bought that crap you said about ditching Junior Prom for the trig final. I can't believe you did so badly on your PSATs either. What happened, were you having an off-day or something?"

"Stop imposing your mortal standards on me," Pence said feelingly, sprawling out on the Afghan rug. "Actually, what happened was, I kind of totally forgot about PSATs, right, so I was up half the night before running simulations. Slept through the entire writing section."

He smiled with chagrin, and continued, "As to the J.P. thing, admit it, you're just _wishing_ you'd come up with something half as clever. Maybe then you wouldn't be in this situation."

Roxas threw the bag of Doritos at his head, and went to pop in the tape. "When Olette drives me to a premature, stress-related death, you're the first person I'm coming back to haunt."

- - -

**TBC**

* * *

**A/N:** In memory of December, 1998.


	4. Chapter IV

**Title:** My Girlfriend, Who Lives In Canada

**Pairings:** Axel/Roxas, Olette/Rai, others

**Disclaimer:** The Kingdom Hearts franchise and its characters do not belong to me.

**Summary:** Roxas has a pretend girlfriend. People give him shit about it. In more ways than one.

**A/N: **While reading this chapter, it's good to keep in mind that I think of Axel as a total girl.

* * *

**IV.**

- - -

In an unusually cruel twist of events, Pence's sister had apparently taped over his vintage, not-available-in-stores copy of _Back To The Future III_ with a special _Mean Girls _TNT rerun. While Pence went through the five steps of grief, Roxas dug around for his PlayStation, and then they just slammed round after round of Katamari Damacy until all four of their eyeballs threatened to pop out.

"This just reached a new level of pathetic," Pence informed him later, going through Roxas's trigonometry homework with a red felt-tip pen.

Roxas stared intently at the ceiling of his bedroom, willing the obnoxious theme music to stop ricocheting around the interior of his skull. "I'm real sorry about all those amazing parties you're missing out on," he said, rolling a stress ball between his hands. It had a red-and-orange swirly pattern, a color scheme that used to be completely absent from his life.

Pence looked up and said, "Actually, I was talking about your homework. I've never seen anyone make such a travesty out of logarithms before—it's kind of hurting me a little inside, to be honest."

"I will kill you with this," Roxas threatened him with the stress ball.

The homework argument was old. Pence said that he had developed a physical aversion to the way Roxas couldn't seem to grasp even the most basic principles of mathematics; Roxas claimed that the same argument could be made about Pence's near tragic affair with The Scarlet Letter. Then they both agreed never to speak of this matter again or at least until the next time they disagreed, which was usually about the point where Olette slapped them on the backs of their heads and told them to shut up, she couldn't hear Jack and Rose declaring their love, and Hayner made a broken, pitiful noise from the dark corner where he had curled up in a fetal position upon the start of the video.

Pence made another face and crossed out what appeared to be an entire paragraph from Roxas's math notebook. "Olette must have left about twenty angry voicemails in my inbox by now," he mumbled distantly.

Roxas felt an uncomfortable shift start up in his stomach. He rolled to a sitting position, and said, "Er. What _are_ you going to tell her tomorrow?"

"I'm asking myself the same question," Pence said morosely.

Unreasonable guilt was a very unattractive feeling. This had gone on long enough.

"Pence," Roxas began solemnly. "There's something I have to tell you."

His friend blinked up at him expectantly.

"I don't have a girlfriend," Roxas said, in the hushed tone of One Revealing A Great Truth. "There is no Anna. I made the whole thing up to get Olette off my case."

There was a brief pause. Then Pence leveled him with a pitying look, and said simply, "I know that."

Roxas didn't exactly bite his tongue, but it was very, very hard. "You know? How the hell could you possibly know?"

In return, Pence just kind of rolled his eyes, like _he_ was the one being tried and it was oh-so-difficult to bear. "Roxas, don't insult my intelligence," he said. "First of all, it's a very vast intelligence and you'll look like a complete tool--" Roxas brandished the stress ball menacingly. "--and second, _of course_ I knew. No offense, but for all that you're all quiet and don't really talk about yourself, you've got to be, like, the worst liar I've ever seen. Way worse than _Hayner_, and he has chronic Foot In Mouth Syndrome."

Roxas couldn't believe what he was hearing. Only yesterday, he had thought he had had two good friends; only now did he finally see them for the vultures that they were.

"Anyway," Pence went on pointedly. "My point is, you're not fooling anyone—well, Olette, but that's only because you've got that boyband prettiness thing going for you…"

"Boyband prettiness?" Roxas interrupted, a little bit horrified.

"I'm just saying," Pence said, somewhat bitterly. "That's how it works: girls just take one look at your khakis fashion and your There's Something About Mary sperm-hair and they'll believe anything that comes out of your mouth. With guys like me, I tell Olette I might fail the _trig_ final and she doesn't even bat an eyelash."

Okay, so that made him feel bad—but only a little.

"Of course, the downside of this is that you kind of lose all sense of privacy," Pence continued. He tapped his chin thoughtfully, and added in a placid voice, "I think it's sort of like poetic justice."

"Really?" Roxas asked facetiously. "You don't say. You're amazing, Pence, I think you're wasting your time with all that com-sci crap—you should be the next Carl Jung."

"When I am king of Silicon Valley, you'll be first against the wall," Pence told him serenely. Then he put down Roxas's notebook and gave him a sobered look. "Listen. If you really want to keep Olette in the dark about your fake relationship, I wouldn't mind keeping my lips sealed for awhile. At least until Junior Prom blows over and school lets out."

Roxas blinked at him wordlessly. "You'd do that?" he asked after a moment. "You're—a much better person than I thought, Pence."

"Right," Pence said. "And in return, you'll be doing my English homework for everyday that Anna is your girlfriend."

o0o

After Roxas had negotiated the terms of agreement down to three English essays and a rather enthusiastic noogie (he threw that one in for free, he was magnanimous like that), he and Pence spent twenty minutes collaborating on the fabulous and entirely fabricated personal history of Anna Francesca Ethelstan, naughty Catholic girl with a mild case of caffeine addiction and a penchant for unfortunate footwear. They started freaking each other out around the bit about home schooling and knee-high stockings, which was about the same time that Pence decided he had to be going anyway. Roxas said goodbye to him at the door, making absolutely no eye contact.

When he went back inside, the house was dark and quiet, heavy with the smell of old wood and lemon-eucalyptus. There was no light spilling out from the crack underneath his father's door, and for a moment, Roxas just stood in the hallway outside his room with his back to the wall, closed his eyes and breathed in as quietly as possible.

Then he pulled out his cell phone. The time was 12:13. He scrolled to speed dial number three and opened a blank text message. He stared at it for awhile. Then he closed it again.

At 12:15, he created another one. This time, he typed in all lower case letters:

_have you ever considered catholicism? _

He stared at the message some more. Then he deleted it quickly and stomped back into his room, throwing himself down on the bed in a fit of intense self-loathing.

"I'm okay with it," he muttered to himself, and reached over to turn out the light.

o0o

He was less okay with it the following day, when Kairi from third period gym class sashayed up to his table during lunch and asked him to go with her to the Junior Prom.

"What did you say?" Roxas said, sounding squeaky. He cleared his throat and made a last-ditch attempt at personal dignity, "Sorry, I meant—come again?"

Kairi tossed her dark auburn hair and batted her lashes. She smiled with her sweet, gummy pink mouth, and canted her hip against the side of the lunch table casually. Her cut-off jeans skirt rode up, flashing the long, smooth curves of her thighs, the jangling charm bracelet slung around her trim ankle. "I asked if you would like to go to Junior Prom with me," she repeated patiently, stroking a finger over the back of her hand.

Someone made a loud choking sound in the background, and Roxas glanced over to see Kairi's friend Sora twisting around completely on his bench to stare at them incredulously. He was gulping air like a fish on land. He really should pay more attention to his lunch, Roxas thought, because Riku was stealing curly fries from his tray.

Their eyes caught, and Sora made a face at him. Frankly speaking, everything was starting to get a bit too déjà vu for his taste, but Roxas wasn't particularly worried. Whereas with Rai the prospect of the locker room lunge was a very real and obvious threat, if it was going to be _Sora_ and him starring in HBO's _Oz_, Roxas privately felt he could probably take the guy.

He turned back to the sight of Kairi's pretty, encouraging smile, her dimpled cheeks and sparkling blue eyes, and felt all the bravado seep out of him totally and immediately.

"Uh," he began. There was no conversation in the world he could possibly want to have less. "I—I'd love to go to the dance with you, Kairi."

Behind him, there was a loud thud. Sora had apparently crashed face-first into his table, and was currently making weak moaning noises into its surface. Calmly, Riku reached over and swiped his pudding cup.

Kairi was still smiling at him, dipping her head and twirling a lock of hair around her finger. She really was very pretty, probably didn't have an ear fetish or anything, and for a brief moment, Roxas found himself actually considering it. It wouldn't be so bad. Kairi was just nice, and she smelled like some kind of tropical fruit, all sweet and heady—girls always smelled like food somehow, he thought with a jolt, perhaps he should start researching perfume, cinnamon and tobacco smoke probably didn't sound very feminine and realistic…

Oh, right. There was _that_ bit of the problem.

"But," Roxas said awkwardly, feeling his ears burn and wishing he could hide his face behind his hand or something. "I can't."

Kairi blinked at him. "Oh," she said quietly. "Okay."

"It's not like that," Roxas said quickly, the words coming out in a rush despite his having not the faintest clue what he was talking about. "It's just. I have—I have a girlfriend!"

"I see," Kairi said, nodding slowly. Then she turned abruptly and called across the cafeteria, "Was that okay, Olette?"

With slowly dawning horror, Roxas followed her gaze, and saw Olette emerge from behind a pillar, giving Kairi a rueful thumbs-up.

"Sorry, Roxas," Kairi said, smiling down at him apologetically. "No hard feelings, alright?"

"Sure," he managed weakly, about three minutes after she had gone back to her table, where Sora greeted her with a blindingly relieved grin and said some dopey thing that resulted in Kairi punching him in the arm. Riku shook his head, and offered her Sora's pudding cup.

Roxas was still trying to process all that had just gone down here when he felt someone slide into the seat next to him. He whipped around with a purpose.

"Olette, what the hell?"

"What?" Olette said defensively. "I was testing you."

Roxas choked. "By siccing Kairi on me? _Kairi_?"

"What's wrong with Kairi?" Olette protested, rounding on him with her stormiest expression. "She's hot. And a _redhead_. That's totally your type!"

As if on cue, Hayner suddenly materialized at his elbow and chimed in with, "_Dude_. Did I just see _Kairi_ hitting on you? She's so totally hot!"

Roxas couldn't resist the urge to bury his face in his hands and moan, so he did, and missed Pence's arrival, which was announced by his measured voice, saying, "I don't know. Hot she might be, but Kairi's so stuck on Riku and Sora there might as well be glue involved."

"Which one do you think she prefers?" Hayner said excitedly. Hayner was on the JV lacrosse team. Roxas had no idea why he was always hanging around the cafeteria instead of training on the pitch like the rest of the jocks. "I heard from a guy in her homeroom class that she's dating both of them _at the same time_. That must be it, right? I mean, Riku's a senior, there's no reason he would be sitting with them all the time otherwise."

Olette gave him a sound, gratifying thwack upside the head. "Don't talk about things you don't know," she said sternly. "They're just good friends—they've known each other basically forever."

"Either way," Pence said, shrugging delicately. "You could have picked a better decoy, Olette. Roxas's girlfriend is the classic fiery type, and Kairi's burgundy at best."

And just like on Monday, when Roxas had made his first foray into shooting himself squarely in the foot, silence fell like a lead curtain around their table following Pence's non sequitur.

Then everyone began talking at once.

"You've _met_ her?" Olette said shrilly, her voice drowning out Hayner's inferior sputtering. "_When_? Is that why you've been ignoring my calls and avoiding me this morning?"

"She visited Roxas while I was over last night," Pence explained with another elaborately earnest shrug. "Sneaked out of her house and climbed in through his window." He gave Roxas a secret wink. "Rebellious, that Anna."

Roxas gave him a venomous glare. Olette slapped a hand over her gaping mouth. Hayner… just kind of fell out of his seat.

In the ensued confusion, Olette quickly cornered Pence and began interrogating him for information. Roxas rubbed the bridge of his nose and entered yet another doomed to failure negotiation with his blood pressure, as Hayner shakily peeled himself up from the floor.

"Man, this is all just too much," he said, sounding deeply awed. "Next thing, you're going to come out and tell us that she lives in Canada or something."

That was Wednesday.

o0o

"You look constipated. Stop being so nervous. Everything is going to be _fine_."

"I'm not nervous."

"Yeah, you are. I can always tell when people are nervous. It's a gift of mine. Me, for example, I get a little mean and hostile--"

"A _little_?"

"But you? Now, you just get _real_ quiet, which is why it's harder to tell 'cause you're usually pretty quiet to begin with."

"Tell me," Roxas said dulcetly. "In your head, do these plans of yours ever sound like they would be anything other than completely insane?"

Axel waved this question away like it was so much confetti in the grand parade of his life.

"When you do something you think might be crazy," he said brightly, eyes shining, "you always got to ask yourself, 'Whatever it is, _will it be worth the story to tell afterward?_' If the answer's yes then you got nothing to worry about. That's how I see it, anyway."

"Yeah, and somehow, that still doesn't make this a good idea," Roxas said brusquely.

For emphasis, he swept his hand broadly over the two office chairs standing innocuously beside them. He hadn't known what to make of the situation when he had seen the pair of them trailing faithfully behind Axel's scooter when he had arrived at their rendezvous earlier, but this—this was just ridiculous.

"Racing down a hill on _roller chairs_?!"

"You don't sound very excited," Axel said. He seemed genuinely puzzled by this.

"Do you realize how easily these things flip?" Roxas pointed out, feeling the very boundaries of his humanity going under cosmic trial. "I'm not very excited about getting my _neck broken_, no."

Sometimes, it hurt to think this guy was his inspiration for an impromptu romantic interest.

Just as well. Axel would most likely make a pretty awful girl anyway, Roxas decided with great justice. He would look terrible, for one. It would be like looking at a different version of him, but through a drop of water, everything distorted and pear-shaped and weird. Roxas wasn't the kind of sick fuck who would mentally slap the appropriate curves onto his _male_ friend's gangly frame for kicks or anything, but he wasn't above imagining the sharp cheekbones softening a little, perhaps a slight (very, _very_ slight) accentuation of the hips.

Longer hair. Maybe a few pounds heavier—it wasn't like he couldn't use the weight. Some less revolting clothes, perhaps. The same eyes, bottle green and slanted.

Axel-ina. Anna. His girlfriend.

Gender-bending people in your mind evidently was an absorbing task, as Axel gave him a weird look and began waving frantically in front of his face and asking if anybody was home. Roxas batted his hand away and snapped that he was fine, just leave him alone already.

"Okay. But who the hell is Anna?"

Roxas almost went into cardiac arrest.

"What?!" he yelped, and immediately hated himself. "No one! I didn't say anything about anyone named Anna whatsoever."

Axel continued to gaze at him strangely. "Uh, yes, you did. You just said, 'I'm fine, leave me alone, Anna'. Kind of loudly, too."

"Did I?" Roxas said, and resisted the urge to expel a loud, fake, bitter laugh. "That's totally odd. I must have been thinking of somebody else."

"Oh," Axel said shortly. His face was unreadable, but he never took his eyes off Roxas. "Oh, I see how it is."

Then, without a further word, he spun around and began walking away.

o0o

Roxas spent approximately two point five minutes staring—baffled—after the bony rise of Axel's retreating shoulders before he said, "What the hell?" and started running after him.

With his considerably longer legs, Axel could well have made it back to his scooter and driven away by now if that little dramatic display were any indication, but it turned out he hadn't gone far. When Roxas finally caught up with him, fighting a minor stitch in the side of his ribs, Axel was sitting at the base of a nearby tree. He pulled out a packet of cigarettes and lit one—not his trademark Marlboro Red, but some kind of long, thin, black-papered variety. For a long moment, no one spoke.

"What are you doing?" Roxas asked, finally breaking the stalemate. "I thought we were going to race down the hill?"

"I don't feel like it anymore," Axel sniffed. In a stage whisper, he added, "Just when you think you know a person."

This had to register at least a 6 on Roxas's scale of weird, but he decided to ignore it, and valiantly soldiered forth. "What is your problem? And what the hell is that you're smoking?" he asked, wrinkling his nose as a strange smoky-sweet scent filled his nostrils.

"It's clove," Axel muttered sullenly, fingering the dark spine of his cigarette. "You kept pissing and moaning about the smoke stinking up your clothes and stuff, so I switched brands." He spooled out a stream of bluish smoke, and made a face. "These are total shit."

"Way to completely miss the point," Roxas sniped bitchily. "Switching brands—_that'll_ save you from dying before thirty." Privately, he was somewhat taken aback. Who knew Axel had actually been listening all those times Roxas had criticized his vices?

Axel continued puffing at his aromatic cancer stick stubbornly. "What's it to you? This is nothing. Back in Toronto, I used to get bombed, like, everyday…"

"I'm sorry," Roxas interrupted. "Did you say Toronto?"

"Yeah," said Axel. "That's where I'm from."

For one long second, everything in Roxas's mind seemed to reach a crashing halt, dead silence.

Then… "YOU'RE_ CANADIAN_?!"

Axel stared at him dubiously. "I'm sure I've mentioned that before."

Roxas knew his mouth was opening and closing soundlessly, but he couldn't seem to do anything about it. This could not be happening. What had he ever done to the universe?

"Then again," Axel went on in a sarcastic tone. "It's not like you ever pay attention to what I say anyway. You're too busy thinking about Anna. Your _girlfriend_."

"When did I say Anna was my girlfriend?" Roxas asked in disbelief. God, was it possible to develop a migraine from frustration?

"Didn't have to," Axel said, without much internal logic. "I could tell from your tone of voice. Why don't you just go spend some quality time with Anna. Your _girlfriend_."

And that was how Roxas knew he had been wrong before, so, so wrong, because _this_ was the worst conversation in the world. "There _is_ no Anna. I don't have a girlfriend!"

Somewhere deep inside, he knew this was comeuppance for all his latent misdeeds. It only made sense that he had spent the last three days trying to convince the rest of the world that he was in a relationship, and now he couldn't even persuade one person to believe that he was single. The irony slathered on thick and bitter.

"That's very tragic for you," Axel said. "You should tell it to someone who cares. Because I don't."

Roxas could feel his fingers automatically flexing in a familiar grasping motion, conveying some silent wish to wrap themselves around a certain scrawny neck and just _squeeze_.

"I have to say, I _really_ feel for the poor girl," Axel went on snootily, utterly oblivious to his imminent demise by forced asphyxiation. "If _my_ boyfriend consistently denied my existence, _I _would be pretty upset. What've you got to be so ashamed about anyway, is she _disfigured_ or something?"

"Oh, _very_," Roxas sniped. "Completely heinous."

"It's nice to see you have such low standards," Axel said loftily. "Not that it matters to _me_, per se, since I don't--"

"You don't care!" Roxas's snapped, finally reaching the limit of his saintly patience. "Fine, fine, I get it. _Of course_ you don't care—if your head weren't up your ass half the time you'd have realized by now that the fact that I can spend most of my free time either talking to _you_ or riding around with you on _your_ scooter, and, oh, let's not forget, taking your ten thousand inane text messages everyday, would indicate that I might, I don't know, _not have a girlfriend_."

"Oh," Axel said eloquently. His cigarette had gone out, but he didn't seem to notice.

There was a moment of thick, meaningful silence, in which Roxas quickly reassessed his sudden outburst and immediately wished for a black hole to open up beneath his feet. The universe noticeably failed to oblige.

"Well, then," said Axel, breaking the pause, and sucked on his cigarette uselessly. "It appears that we have ourselves a problem."

Roxas gave him a suspicious look. "And what would that be?"

"It's just occurred to me that we've known each other for the better part of three months without actually knowing anything _about_ each other," Axel said.

"That's not a problem," Roxas argued, feeling heat spread alarmingly along his temples. "That's—that's just the rule of the thing."

"Excuse me?" Axel snorted, raising an eyebrow. "The rule of the thing? I'm sorry, you're going to have to be a little more specific than that. You Yanks are all weirdos, and I don't speak lunatic."

Up until now, Roxas had never even entertained the thought that irony could be so grossly overrated.

It had also never occurred to him that Axel might not be on the same wave length as far as the whole "no questions, no lies" thing was concerned, and in this sense, maybe—maybe there _wasn't_ more to it than that. Maybe Axel was just weird.

Roxas had been operating under a lot of false assumptions, apparently.

"So what is it that you want?" he said, trying not to sound defeated. A sense of disappointment settled heavily into his chest, rolling up like a knot along his spine, and he didn't know why.

"A/S/L would be a start," Axel said cheerfully. He seemed to have regained his good mood. "Or if that's too chatroom-creepy for you—hell, anything the fuck you want. Relationship status's already a no-brainer."

His smile grew a little less alarming, and he went on in a slightly softened tone, beseeching and possibly even earnest, "Come on, let's do this one over, eh?"

"Why did you feel the need to do that?" Roxas asked, narrowing his eyes. Then he stared down at his shoes and, feeling increasingly stupid, launched into his introduction, "My name is Roxas. Van Leeuwen. I'm a junior at Amherst Regional High."

He paused for a moment, and added lamely, "I'm from New York."

"Very nice to make your acquaintance, Roxas Van Leeuwen from New York," Axel said, shaking his hand with mock solemnity. "I'm Axel Bailey. What do you know, I'm also a junior at Amherst. College, that is. And you already know I hail from beautiful Toronto of the Great White North..."

"Yeah, and the thought is going to hurt for days," Roxas muttered under his breath. He noticed that Axel still had his hand, and pulled his fingers back with a jerk, still pretending to be deeply intrigued by his scuffed trainers.

After a moment, he looked up and said, "I would never have pegged you as the kind of guy with a name like _Bailey_."

Axel cocked an eyebrow. Then he smirked and said, "And I would never have pegged you as the kind of guy who doesn't have a girlfriend," and Roxas was immediately compelled to have his stupid face make nice with the dirt.

o0o

Later, after the adrenaline rush from shotgunning down a steep hillside had faded—Axel's chair _had_ flipped, but he had gotten up almost immediately, and Roxas was certain the gash in his knee had to stop bleeding at _some_ point—and they were dragging themselves back to where Rosalina was parked, Axel suddenly got an inspired/crazed look in his eyes and started rummaging through his messenger bag. Momentarily, he produced an mp3 player attached to an enormous pair of headphones.

"Here, put these on," he instructed, tossing them over to Roxas, and began fiddling with the buttons on his mp3 player.

"What do you want now?" Roxas asked, equal parts curious and exasperated.

"Just listen."

Roxas cast him one last skeptical glance, and placed the headphones around his ears. He blinked in surprise. _Sweet Child O' Mine_ was blasting at full volume, the familiar rip of electric guitar thrumming against his eardrums, shrill and catchy and perfect.

"Get it now?" Axel mouthed at him silently.

"You're insane," Roxas mouthed back, and threw the headphones at him. Axel clutched at his chest dramatically, feigning hurt, before totally losing it. His strange bark of laughter filled the clearing.

It was nice to know that, whatever else happened, some things never changed.

That was still Wednesday.

- - -

_Where do we go now?_

- - -

**TBC**

* * *

**A/N: **Okay, so it's pretty much common knowledge that I have the _worst update ethics in the world_. I wish I could help it, but I go to a tough school and chose a competitive major; basically, I'm totally committed to shooting myself in the foot. Your responses are the only things keeping this project afloat these days, so do keep them coming! Hey, I've even learned to answer reviews now. Ask anyone!

PS: I really shouldn't post at 7 in the morning after pulling an all-nighter. Also, I know my in-jokes can get confusing so... in defense of the last section, everybody wiki Axl Rose ;)


	5. Chapter V

**Title:** My Girlfriend, Who Lives In Canada

**Pairings:** Axel/Roxas, Olette/Rai, others

**Disclaimer:** The Kingdom Hearts franchise and its characters do not belong to me.

**Summary:** Roxas has a pretend girlfriend. People give him shit about it. In more ways than one.

* * *

**V.**

Things at school didn't get better or worse for the most part. Instead, they got weird.

Given that Roxas had spent upwards of six months at Amherst Regional High now without invoking the wrath of its healthy, estrogen-fueled gossip vine, he was clearly overdue for a run-in. He knew it. Expected it, really. What he hadn't expected was for it to be so… profuse.

Suddenly, girls were coming of the woodwork, and what was more, they were going out of their way to talk to _him_. It had started with all of Olette's female friends—the ones who never sat with them and gave Roxas, Hayner and Pence the stink eye every time they were seen in Olette's company—and spread like wildfire to the girls who shared his classes. But when people he had never even _talked_ to began to approach him and strike up conversations, Roxas felt it was time to ask, "What the fuck is going on here?"

It was like he'd never been so popular. Which would be great, if he liked that sort of things (he didn't). And, you know, if they didn't insist on asking about his girlfriend Anna.

The whole thing came to heads when he walked to his locker Friday morning and got assaulted by the entire cheerleading squad.

"It's just all so _terribly exciting_," cooed a blonde whom Roxas was certain he had previously spoken to a total number of one time, when she had introduced herself as—Shandi? Brandi?—_Candi_, with an I, and the very fact that he remembered that was ample proof that this place was crushing his soul. "We heard the good news, Roxas. As your friends, we had to give our congratulations in person."

"Um," Roxas said, agonized. Any minute now someone was going to pop out of a locker with balloons and streamers announcing that he was the proud father of a newborn baby boy. "Thanks?"

"You must be really happy."

"Yeah, it's going really—great." He wanted to die. "Just—top notch."

The cheerleaders broke into a collective tittering fit. Candi with an I shook her head of perfect curls and crowed triumphantly, "Honeymoon phase, I _knew_ it. The beginning's always the best part—I bet all you guys do is hold hands and make out, right?"

This would have been the point where Roxas covered his ears and curled up on the floor in a fetal position to await death by pleated skirts and pom-poms, but his cell phone chose that moment to start ringing, saving him from any further heckling. For the time.

"Hello," Roxas said, retreating to a quiet corner and giving his well-wishers the timeless one-minute finger. "Roxas speaking."

"I want your life for one second where my big problem is that girls find me interesting and track me down at school to talk," said Pence.

Roxas looked up to see Pence leaning against his locker further down the hallway with his phone pressed to his ear and a deeply amused look on his face, directed straight at Roxas. They were standing maybe ten yards apart.

"Pen--" he began in a warning tone, only to be interrupted when Pence said, "I'm not Pence. I'm Anna, your girlfriend. I'm doing my part to keep up this shameful farce, just play along. Now turn around and wave at your fangirls."

"You're on thin ice," Roxas cautioned through gritted teeth. Then he forced that honor-bound plastic grin on his face again and said, "Anna, I was _just_ thinking about you," just loud enough for everyone else in the hall to hear.

All the cheerleaders' expressions changed immediately, knowing smiles and soft looks bordering on affection, and Roxas had to wonder if the school hadn't somehow been filled with confused puppies without his notice.

"Of course I miss you," he soldiered on, serving up his dignity on a platter. "Did you miss me?"

"Oh my God," Pence said disbelievingly, mouth moving quietly down the hall. "I take back what I said before. This is really killing you, isn't it?"

"You have no idea," Roxas muttered. Out loud, he chided, "No, coffee isn't good for your skin, but you know I'll love you no matter what." The cheerleaders sighed appreciatively. He could sense the hormones rising.

"_Right_," said Pence. "And that concludes my brief detour into the Twilight Zone for the day." He added, as a parting shot, "Remember that Steinbeck paper due next week," and hung up.

Roxas almost couldn't resist making ugly faces at his phone, but immediately remembered that he was still under close scrutiny. Sure enough, the sense of impending doom started sneaking up on him in approximately 2.5 seconds flat, and he saw that the squad was once more circling the perimeter, prowling for an in. Candi was looking particularly carnivorous.

"Hey, girls! Um, can I talk to you all for a minute?"

Roxas looked up, and felt strange relief rushed through him like a freight train at the sight of Kairi, breaking away from a conversation she had clearly been having with Riku to walk over to the huddle, looking more uncomfortable than he had ever seen her.

"We need to go have that—team discussion," Kairi said awkwardly, obviously making it up as she went along. "You know, about our formations for the next game. Remember when I had that special memo sent out?"

All the girls passed around a look of mighty confusion, but this was evidently par for the course in pom-pom land, and after a moment, they broke camp and dutifully traipsed after their captain, a few still casting lingering looks over their shoulders at Roxas. Apparently, _some_ high school stereotypes were actually quite legit—and God bless them.

_Thank you_, Roxas mouthed silently after Kairi, who just gave him a tiny, rueful shrug.

o0o

"Look, all I'm saying is that maybe I don't exactly enjoy all this extra attention, so I would really appreciate it if you could just call your hyenas off a bit."

Roxas was in chemistry, his last class of the day, and he had resorted to talking it out with Olette, in parts because she was kind of the source of all his troubles, in parts because he had no one else to turn to. He'd tried talking to Hayner about it, only to have his best friend cast doubtful, mystified looks in his direction for five minutes before going back to glaring meaningfully at Seifer. That damn rivalry was ruining their friendship.

"Don't you think you're being a little dramatic?" Olette asked him patiently.

"No," Roxas said flatly. "Listen to this. Yesterday, at lunch, Lydia came up to congratulate me on my new relationship. _Lydia_. Who, supposedly, _hates_ me. Now do you still think I'm being dramatic?"

"You're making it sound like it's all my fault," Olette said, wrinkling her nose in a way that was freaky but distractingly adorable. It momentarily brought Roxas back to another chemistry period six months ago, when he had just joined the class and met his lab partner Olette for the first time.

They had shared this exact same lab table, and he remembered being so taken with her that for all of four seconds, something of a nascent crush had been in the building, only to be forcefully choked and killed when Olette had leveled him a stern look and said, "What exactly do you think you're doing with that beaker?"

Even now, she was monopolizing the lab instruments, thin fingers fluttering over delicate test tubes. Only, it was mostly endearing rather than annoying these days, especially given the fact that Roxas was no more apt at chemistry than he was at trigonometry.

"It's not your fault," he said leniently, passing her a roll of Starburst under the table. "But couldn't you at least try to curb the gossip mill a little? Let's not even pretend you don't rule this school with an iron fist when the mood strikes you."

"That's not true," Olette said, but she was smiling. Popping a piece of candy into her mouth, she went on thoughtfully, "I suppose I could talk to the girls after school. In return, though, you have to promise me something."

"What?"

"You have to promise that you'll introduce me to Anna someday."

Roxas blanched. "Uh. I can't do that."

"Why not?" Olette asked, narrowing her eyes at him through her goggles. She ducked her head when the teacher glanced in their direction, and in a whisper, added, "Why is it that you've always got to be so secretive about her?"

Roxas's creativity and desperation had a direct relationship, apparently, because his lies were getting better and more convincing by the day: "Probably because the last time I decided to divulge any kind of personal information at this school, the female populace turned me into the new Lindsay Lohan."

Olette made a dismissive gesture with her hand. "Lindsay Lohan?"

"I'm not even kidding," Roxas said facetiously.

They seemed to reach a truce for a moment, lapsing into a comfortable silence punctuated by stabs of white noise, tinkling glass and chattering classmates.

"But can't you just show me a picture?" Olette asked, and Roxas allowed his head to fall onto the lab table, drained of life.

He couldn't be more glad it was Friday.

o0o

Then he came home to find his dad in the living room sobbing silently over a picture frame of his mom that he hadn't seen since moving into this house, and felt his stomach drop out.

o0o

Roxas's mother had been a Julliard graduate, and a curator at the New York Met prior to the diagnosis. She had given Naminé her coloring, winterwheat hair and big china-blue eyes, her small hands and artistic flair, but Roxas had her smile, her heart, her taste in poetry—T.S. Eliot, Harold Pinter, Lynda Hull—and it was getting harder and harder to hold on to that.

She had been a devout fan of Bob Dylan's music, and whenever she thought no one else was around, she would play his records in their family room. Let the music float up softly as she swayed—and his mother didn't dance, just moved with elegance, flirting with the emptiness in the middle of the room, wearing one of those long, swirly, foreign-looking skirts that she loved so much, the kind that seemed dangerously full, got caught in car doors and bicycle wheels but was unfaultably graceful anyway.

In the summer following his sixteenth birthday, Roxas was supposed to be signing up for SAT prep courses and preparing for his junior year of high school. Instead, he:

(a) Stopped talking to his sister, his dad, his then-best friend.

(b) Broke up with his girlfriend of one year, and, most noticeably

(c) Spent ten hours a day curled up in a wicker rocking chair in the family room, with an unopened book in his lap and all the curtains around him pulled open.

Sunlight melted across the room, draping and brilliant and Monet garden series beautiful, and the dancing beams made him see things, made him feel safe again, like the Earth had stopped moving. This place stood still. He could stay here forever.

Once in awhile, his father would come into the room in the middle of the day, stand behind Roxas and stare down at the top of his head. Sometimes, he stood there for hours, but if the silence between them had been cold two months ago then it was arctic now, barren and intractable. Suddenly, his dad wasn't meeting his eye, wasn't meeting _Naminé's_ eye, and for some time Roxas had worried at his sister to talk to their father, make him eat and ensure he didn't die right along with their mother or something, until Naminé had told him, in no uncertain terms, that the fact that she had mom's coloring and artistic flair and Roxas had her smile and her heart _was_ the reason Dad could no longer look at them.

That was when he stopped talking to Naminé as well.

o0o

But he wasn't thinking any of these thoughts as he stood outside the living room of his Amherst home, staring at his father's shaking back until his eyes blurred, and even though they had the length of the room between them, he could count the knobs of vertebrae at the top of his dad's spine, jumping up and down, little dorsal traitors.

So he went back out into the hallway, opened the front door and slammed up it shut with as much strength as he could call up in that moment.

"Roxas, buddy?" he heard his dad call from the living room, the broken note barely concealed. "Is that you?"

"Yeah," Roxas answered, and his voice nearly cracked as well. He veered into the kitchen purposefully, to buy his dad more time. "I'm really thirsty, so I'm just grabbing a drink, okay?"

He opened the refrigerator, and appropriated a can of Coke for his hands. His fingers felt strange and frozen around the cold aluminum, but at least they were calm.

And so was his father, when he finally came into the kitchen, and Roxas was immeasurably relieved to see that Silent, Sobbing Dad had retreated back to whatever dark place it was that he came from, and Amherst Dad was back, tall and gray-haired and funny and smiling, suspiciously dry-eyed. It was easier to marshal defenses when you had someone else fighting on your side, an army at your back.

"How was school?" his dad asked hoarsely, leaning a little too casually against the doorway.

"It sucked," Roxas said honestly. "You're home early."

"It happens," his dad said, chuckling. "Aren't you supposed to be at the coffee shop?"

"I switched shifts," Roxas lied, making a show of popping open his Coke.

"Great," his dad said. "Want to help me kick off the weekend with a bang?"

"What'd you have in mind?"

His dad laughed, wild and easygoing, and waved his hand expressively. "I'm thinking pizza, I'm thinking unhealthy amounts of sugary drinks. I'm thinking we play Halo 3 until I remember to be a responsible parent again and send you to bed."

Roxas grinned.

"Awesome, you order and I'll go set up the Xbox." It had been bought in one of his dad's desperate crusades in the name of manliness, and had spent most of this time sitting pretty and gathering dust in a corner of Roxas's bedroom, but he felt no urgent need to tell his father that. "Don't forget I hate olives."

o0o

On Saturday morning, Axel showed up with a hangover, and suggested that they went joyriding to calm his nerves. He thought it was a good idea. Given that Axel tripped over himself three times trying to dismount his scooter, Roxas didn't give a shit what he thought, and shelved his personal beliefs as they ditched Rosalina for the day and hauled off to Black Sheep for some rousing narcotics-laced espresso on foot.

"I think my neurons are starting to come back to life now," Axel said feebly, fifteen minutes and two cups of said life-giving nectar later. He paused for a moment, and then shook his head morosely, "Nope, false alarm. Those Smith parties are rough, man."

"Isn't Smith College a women's school?" Roxas said skeptically.

"Exactly," said Axel smugly, curving a gross, leering smirk around his paper cup.

"If you were going to make a Girls Gone Wild reference," Roxas warned, "just quit now while you're ahead."

Axel rolled his eyes. "Oh right, here comes Mr. Judgmental."

"I'm not judgmental," Roxas said, lapsing into defensive mode. "I just think—it wouldn't kill you to think something through before jumping headlong into it every once in awhile. Having priorities. It's what people do, ever heard of it? You should try it sometimes."

"I prioritize _happiness_," Axel said heatedly, gesturing with half a jelly donut. "I'm _happy_ doing what I do. See how I smile all the time? That's happiness!"

"That symptom would also apply to the mentally insane, or any old raver sucking on a methylenedioxymethamphetamine-soaked pacifer," Roxas snapped. It was like they had this conversation every week. "Then again, that's maybe not a good counterpoint with you."

"I think they call it ecstasy nowadays," Axel replied. He had a pained expression on his face, but it wasn't clear whether it was caused by the lingering hangover or the fact that Roxas had said 'methylenedioxymethamphetamine' in one breath. "Besides, I don't have to get high to know I'm happy. If I need a counter example, all I have to do is look at _you_."

Roxas shot Axel a dirty look, and decided not to point out that he had grape jelly smeared all down his chin.

Then they finished up and did their traditional "I'll Pay, No _I'll_ Pay" dance, until Roxas gave Axel a firm shove toward the door, claiming that it was his turn since Axel had footed the bill the last time they went for sushi, and anyway, Axel's wallet was probably still buried under a pile of vomit-stained clothes in some skeezy sorority house or something.

The blond, pixie-ish, obviously gay cashier gave Roxas a sympathetic look over the counter and patted him on the hand. His gray eyes crinkled in a supportive smile, and before Roxas could recoil in hushed suspicion, the guy had cooed, "Don't stress, sweetheart. He acts all tough but I can tell he's totally into you," and given him a cheery thumbs-up.

"Uh, it's not—" Roxas tried to tell him.

"Oh, I see you haven't told him yet," the cashier said, eyes huge. "It's okay, my lips are sealed," he confirmed, and handed Roxas his receipt with a conspiratorial wink.

Roxas staggered out into the street, stunned, and did not regain his power of speech for a full three minutes. This was an organized madness—it was slowly and surely seeping into every aspect of his life, and there was nothing he could do to stop its encroachment.

"What's with you?" Axel asked, staring at him oddly.

"Did you hear what that guy said?" Roxas stammered. "He thinks we're--" but before he could lose the rest of his mind and blunder out 'dating' or 'boyfriends' or something else along those lines that would subsequently ensure the bloodiest massacre in Massachusetts since 1770, Axel had snorted and said, "Hobos? Yeah, I don't know about you but I get that at least five times a day. This one time--"

It was, all things considered, extremely fortunate that Axel loved the sound of his own voice—or the voices, as the case may be. Roxas reflected on this as he nodded along in quiet relief, and settled into his usual routine of pretending to know exactly what his friend was talking about at any given time.

o0o

So, then, they were on top of the hill where the roller chair race had taken place the other day, and Roxas was reading as Axel shot his mouth off. Perfect blue sky above, green grass below. The breeze blowing like a memory. Just another Saturday morning in Amherst.

_Though all my witnesses are dead_, Roxas read quietly to himself, as Axel prattled on and on in the background about some crazy bitch and a hookah. He was trying to focus on the text, but his eyes could barely stay open—he had not gone to bed until a quarter to four the night before. It had been worth it, though, even if he never wanted to touch Halo 3 ever again.

Still, he would prefer it if--

It was then that Roxas suddenly realized everything had gone quiet. Before he could react, the book he had been reading was jerked from his grasp.

"Hey!"

"What the hell are you reading?" Axel asked, brows furrowed in an ugly scowl as he regarded his newly pillaged spoil.

"It's just a book of poetry," Roxas said quickly. He didn't understand the panic in his own voice—what did he have to be defensive about? "I'm reading a poem. By Harold Pinter."

"Cancer cells are those which have forgotten how to die?" read Axel, echoing the first line. "Roxas, this is just a poem about _cancer_."

"So what?" Roxas said, but for some reason, he couldn't look Axel in the eye. "Since when do you care what I read?"

"Since this obviously isn't _just a poem_," Axel said tartly. "What's going on with you anyway? Don't give me any of that 'I'm fine' shit, you've been acting kooky for days."

"I_ am_ fine," Roxas snapped. This was ridiculous. It wasn't as if Axel had found him in a public restroom _cutting_ or shoving his finger down his throat or any number of similarly stupid things. "I just have a lot to deal with at school right now, okay? It's nothing."

Slowly, Axel handed Roxas back his book, though he continued to stare at him steadily. There was a gleam in his eyes that made Roxas worry he was soon going to find himself in a scenario usually found in an after school special of the worst and most poorly-acted kind.

"Ch'," Axel began, clearing his throat. "You think you got problems? Wait till your dad hates you so much that when he sends you away for college, he sends you to a whole other _country_. See, when I was your age…"

"Excuse me," Roxas interrupted, staring in disbelief. "What are you doing?" he asked, quietly scandalized.

Axel blinked enormously. "I'm trying to tell you about my life."

"Okay," Roxas boggled. "But… _why_?"

"Because we agreed to be more forthcoming with personal details, oh I don't know, _just two days ago_?"

"Yeah, well, that was your idea," Roxas backtracked, quietly horrified. "One which I'm no longer sure is quite so great anymore."

"Unbelievable," Axel muttered, looking completely disgusted. "I _knew_ you were going to try to back out of this some way or other. What the hell are you so afraid of, anyway? And what about that time we talked about our dead moms?"

"I'm not afraid of anything!" Roxas argued. "And that was _different_."

"How is it different?" Axel challenged. "What exactly has changed between then and now?"

Roxas turned away sharply. "I don't know how. It just—it _has_. I don't know."

Oh, but he did know.

It wasn't Axel's fault—a lot of things were, but not this. Of course he couldn't have picked up on any of that. To him, nothing had changed, because he _himself_ hadn't changed. He was just as absurd and contrary and obfuscating as ever, still had a broken brain-to-mouth filter and no sense of self-preservation whatsoever, and all he was trying to do was make small talks, clear the air a bit because Roxas had exhibited emo behavior and brought up personal issues, and yeah, this—this wasn't fair.

It wasn't fair, but knowing that didn't help anything.

"Look," Roxas said, feeling weariness creep into the very marrow of his bone. "I told you about my mother—but I didn't _mean_ to. I never meant to tell anyone about that."

Axel looked like he had been pistol-whipped. Roxas immediately felt stung with pangs of guilt, but there was no going back now.

"Fine," Axel said tersely, and Roxas could tell he was falling back to his prickly, defensive tendencies, haunches raising. "_Fine_. Then why did you?"

"I don't know," Roxas said, shaking his head. "I don't know."

"Goddammit, stop giving me that!"

There was silence. Axel stared at Roxas. Roxas stared at Axel's shoes. Since they were both sitting down, he found their ugliness somehow even more offending close up.

"Just drop it, okay?" Roxas muttered in the end, burning optical venom into a frayed, dingy shoestring. He hated this, why did everything have to be like this? Why couldn't the one part of his life that he counted on for consistency just be left alone?

"No, I _won't_," Axel said stubbornly, and now he was rising, propping himself up on one hand to tower over Roxas, getting all into his face. Their shoulders bumped roughly. "You're trying to tell me that you're perfectly okay with the way things stand—that you can spend day in day out hanging with some _complete stranger_? What, did you cut that day of grade school or something?"

"I know your last name," Roxas said. It sounded lame even in his head. "Where you go to school. Your… license plate numbers."

"Congratulations, you're now on equally intimate terms with me as the guy who takes out my trash," Axel said crabbily. "_Not even_—at least Mike knows what my favorite movie is."

"_Trainspotting_," Roxas spat, and at this, he pushed himself up as well. Their faces inches apart. "And as I seem to recall, you didn't have any problem not getting down and personal for those _three whole months_ that we knew each other."

Axel opened his mouth to argue, but Roxas had had enough. He tried to shove Axel away from him, but misjudged the distance and instead of pushing his shoulder, slammed Axel squarely in his left eye with the heel of his hand, sending him flying backward. He landed flat on his back with a soft thud, spreadeagled and prone.

Before he had time to be concerned, however, Axel was already back on his vertical axis. "Dammit, Roxas!" he hissed, cupping a hand over his injured eye.

"Shit, I'm sorry," Roxas said, scrambling to crouch over him. Terrific. Just wait until the girls at school heard that he was abusing his 'girlfriend'. "Are you hurt?"

"No," said Axel, though his grimace told a completely different story—like he was expecting blood to start geysering out any second. "Fuck, you _are_ stronger than you look."

Roxas found himself at a loss for words, so he reached out and, after a moment's hesitation, started patting Axel's bony shoulder awkwardly. They probably looked retarded, but Axel didn't seem to mind.

"I'm sorry," Axel said suddenly, not making eye contact.

"What?" asked Roxas.

"I'm sorry I kept pushing you," Axel muttered, still covering his left eye. "It's just—I haven't done this a lot, alright?"

Roxas was, appropriately, confused. "Done _what_ a lot?"

"_This_," Axel replied, making a hand gesture that might or might not be offensive in Cambodia. "Putting myself out there, getting to know people and shit. I'm no loner, but keep my own company—it's not like I go out of my way to be the prettiest girl at the dance, you know?"

Roxas couldn't help himself—he burst out laughing, and couldn't seem to stop.

"What the hell's so funny?" Axel asked, but he was looking slightly less annoyed than two minutes ago, so Roxas figured they were cool.

"Just," he said, wheezing. "What you said." He choked out a couple more guffaws. "You're so _weird_."

"Says the guy who randomly assaults people," Axel said, and having sufficiently assured himself that he wouldn't be needing an eye-patch in the near future, began gazing off into the distance.

_Tough guy, right_, Roxas thought, and biting his lip to bury a lingering snigger, said, "So, tell me."

Axel gave him a blank look. "Tell you what?"

"Tell me about your life," Roxas explained, and tried not to cringe visibly. He could do this: other, normal people did this kind of thing all the time. "Tell me—about your dad. You were going to talk about your dad, right?"

"Why the hell would I do that?" Axel said, cocking an eyebrow. "I hate the bastard. He's one of those big pharmaceutical sharks that regularly cheat starving orphans in third world countries and still sleep like a baby at night."

"I didn't know you felt so strongly about humanitarian causes," Roxas said, slightly stunned.

"I don't," Axel grouched. "It also helps that my old man's kind of a grade-A asshole, know what I mean?"

_I think I might have an idea_, Roxas thought meanly, but didn't say it aloud. He was clearly growing as a person, going leaps and bounds. Naminé would be so proud.

"Then tell me about something you _don't_ hate," Roxas said, exasperated. "Like—what about Toronto?"

Axel stared at him evenly, eyes opaque and very, very green. Then he shrugged, saying "I can work with that," and flopped back down onto his back, folding his hands beneath his head. "I'll tell you about Toronto. If you so much as whisper 'igloo', I'll kill you with my eyeliner."

o0o

"_Hey, Roxas. Your sister told me you'd be in here."_

"_I know you're mad at me, and I know I deserve it. I've been a dick. But do you think you could hear me out for a sec?"_

"_I heard you broke up with Julia."_

"_Hey, Roxas..."_

o0o

Roxas snapped his eyes open, to soft apple-green sunlight and the swaying motions of tree branches overhead. He sat up and shook his head blearily. He was still at the top of the hill, where he had apparently passed out, the book of poetry still propped up on his chest, and by the looks of the day, not a lot of time had gone by since.

A slight displacement of air to his left made him look down sharply, to see Axel lying next to him, curled up on his side and fast asleep.

The sight caught him totally off-guard, so much that he had to stop for a second and reassess the situation. "How about that," he muttered to himself. "You _do_ know how to be quiet, Axel."

And did it really well, apparently. For someone who could not lay off flailing around ceaselessly in his conscious moments, Axel was a surprisingly docile sleeper. His breath barely fluttered the tip of his long sidebangs. He was all folded into himself, long limbs retracted and lazy, so that his entire body seemed to shrink in size, small and unguarded. The extreme boniness and piled-on baggy clothes only added to this impression. Hackles down and open to attack.

As quietly as he could manage, Roxas lay back down on the grass, and turned his head to study Axel's face.

Well, it wasn't as _terribly ugly_ as he had previously believed, smoothed of the various crazy expressions and smart-alecky comments. All those people might not have been totally deranged when they thought Axel was hot—at least, it was probably _a little_ unfair to call him disfigured. Although, talks about hypocrisy, where did _this guy_ get off calling _him_ emo? He wore _red eyeliner_, for Christ's sake! He--

Roxas frowned, staring at Axel's eyes, tightly shut in sleep.

On the left side—where Roxas's hand had made contact earlier—the outer corner was smudged, all smeared out in a messy crimson trail roughly parallel to his tattoo. It gave the creepy impression that Axel's eye was bleeding out, making him look even more like a psycho killer clown than usual. _Hot_, Roxas thought, rolling his normal, undecorated eyes, and tried to ignore the niggling thought that Axel was developing one hell of a shiner.

Experimentally, he reached out and prodded Axel in the cheek. Axel responded by growling some incoherent gibberish, and burrowing further into his pillow-arm, growing still immediately. Roxas smirked. This was just criminally easy.

Then he had a great, _terrible_ idea.

**TBC**

* * *

**A/N: **Dudes, so I realize nobody actually reads these 'author's notes' because they're nothing but a cheap forum for me to air out my grievances and complain about school. Except I don't have any school this week, so for those of you who bothered tuning in, I'll give you a special treat. A rec!

Pst, go read: 'Mr. Darcy Is Secretly A Raver' by tsubaki-hana. Yes, the title is awesome, and since you guys like the stuff I churn out, I assume you're all down with AkuRoku, AU, and crack humor. Throwing in some utter brilliance can't possibly hurt. Go now, and tune in next time for your regularly scheduled programming. Oh, and I shouldn't even have to say that when you read, you should give the author reviews so that she will continue in her path of righteousness, should I? Don't worry, I won't get jealous and turn into a crazy withholding bitch. You can still date other people. ;)

The poem Roxas was reading on the hill is, appropriately, 'Cancer Cells' by Harold Pinter.


	6. Chapter VI

**Title:** My Girlfriend, Who Lives In Canada

**Pairings:** Axel/Roxas, Olette/Rai, others

**Disclaimer:** The Kingdom Hearts franchise and its characters do not belong to me.

**Summary:** Roxas has a pretend girlfriend. People give him shit about it. In more ways than one.

**A/N:** No, you're not seeing things. This is a real update. Enjoy.

* * *

**VI.**

"Shove over! Let me see!"

"No way, you harpy! You've had your turn, and I've only been looking for two seconds. Keep your friggin' pants on!"

"_You_ keep your pants on. I didn't get a good enough look the first time, now _give it_!"

"Guys?" Roxas began uncertainly, only to be effectively drowned out by the lively tussle kept up by Hayner and Olette, fighting over custody of his cell phone, which was looking increasingly harassed and more like a child in a troubled home by the minute from where he was standing.

From a relatively safe distance, Pence looked up from the CD he had been examining to offer a tart, "This would never have happened if we had gone to a movie like I suggested," voice masked with an air of studied disinterest to hide the latent bitterness no doubt simmering beneath the surface of his equanimity.

It was a perennially lost cause anyway, and Roxas didn't know why Pence even bothered. Olette always won the weekend-hangout battle, which meant they ended up going to the mall more often than his diminishing masculinity could probably countenance. But it was much easier (and less hazardous) capitulating to her whims than putting up a fight. Clearly, Roxas reflected, if Hayner and Pence hadn't had the sense to stem Olette's female empowerment arc when it had first reared its stubborn hormonal head, they had no one to blame but themselves. It was a pity, really, that he must suffer for that kind of oversight.

At this moment, they were in a record store, huddling around in the alternative rock section. It was pretty deserted for a Sunday morning in June, which said a lot about the state of music appreciation in this town. At the same time, there were a lot of giggling girls buying albums with pictures of some guy named Jesse McCartney on the cover, and Roxas just wasn't going to think about that.

He didn't particularly want to think about the reason two of his best friends were currently making a joint effort to molest his phone, either.

Presently, Olette appeared to have had enough, and—skillfully elbowing Hayner out of the way—appropriated Roxas's cell phone for herself, staring at the screen with a fascinated, softly affectionate expression. Roxas's finer senses immediately perked up at the sign of danger, smelling blood in the water from a mile away.

"This is so sweet of you, Roxas," Olette told him, eyes sparkling and suspiciously misty with what was probably pride. "I wish I'd thought of keeping a picture of Rai as my wallpaper."

"Yeah--" Roxas demurred sheepishly, which Olette apparently took for shy bliss as she opened immediately her mouth to continue rejoicing with him, only to be interrupted by Hayner, making a spirited lunge for the phone and yelling, "Give it here! I couldn't see anything!"

By the time Olette had delivered her just and proper smack-down, Hayner was left sitting slumped against a record rack, looking futilely mutinous. He directed a deflated look in Roxas's direction, lamenting, "Why couldn't you take a better picture, dude? Her face wasn't even in the frame, and I could barely see anything because of all the damn sunlight."

Roxas quickly reached out and repossessed his phone—a sunny, overexposed shot of his own grinning mug caught in a tangle of red hair, bony limbs, and what looked like a million wooly multicolored scarves, edging across his field of vision. He schooled his face into an expression of well-rehearsed chagrin and pointed a finger at Hayner, saying, "Easy for you to say. You don't know the hell I went through to get that picture."

This was mostly true—though Roxas neglected to add that 70 percent of the "hell" had come of him trying to maneuver Axel's gangly sleeping body into an appropriately suggestive position without stirring him. Pieces of his soul must have died a plenty that day.

Hayner snorted. "Yeah, right. I have a hard time believing any chick—" Olette shot him a wrinkled-nose look. "—would pass up the opportunity to have her photo taken, _any day_. Nope, I don't buy it."

"Because you know _so much_ about 'chicks'," muttered Olette, sotto voce, at the same time that Roxas moaned loudly and said, "You don't know Anna, man. She's not like other girls—she's, like, almost _mannish_."

Pence made an odd, hysterical noise in the background, and appeared to be choking on his own tongue. Roxas hated him with the fire of a thousand smoldering homemade rockets.

o0o

Why Roxas hadn't jumped on the swiftest train and made for the hills when this entire mess with the fake girlfriend had started, he had no idea, but that was precisely what he wanted to do at this moment. He loved his friends as much as the next low-maintenance teenager with anti-social tendencies, but when it finally came time for them to split up and do their individual mall-ratting for an hour or so, there was no other word to describe his feelings except: relieved.

And frankly, he was starting to feel a lot like Angela Chase from the earlier episodes of My So-Called Life. He wanted to attribute it to the time his seventh-grade drama teacher Miss Garstedt, without exception the most renown expert on schadenfreude Roxas had ever met, had cast him as Viola in a end-of-school production of Twelfth Night and made all the girls in class cry, but figured that probably wasn't it.

"Or maybe I'm just doomed," he muttered cheerfully to himself. Several passersby gave him strange looks, but he was starting to get used to that.

A glance at his watch informed him that he still had fifty-seven-point-five minutes of freedom before it was time to meet up with his friends in the food court. Roxas briefly considered making a detour to the toys department and catching a few winks in one of those giant dollhouses, but discarded this idea with haste—the last time he'd done this, he had forgotten to set his alarm and gone on sleeping soundly until closing time, when two surly rent-a-cops had physically escorted him from the premises. And then there was facing Olette the next day, which was really the more unfortunate experience.

Maybe if he just closed his eyes and leaned against this here wall, he could make it like a horse and fall asleep standing up.

"_DON'T WORRY, DO YOUR BEST_…"

"I really need to get around to changing that ring tone," Roxas mumbled, pulling out his cell phone and flipping it open. Beneath a snapshot of a Jamba Juice™ Strawberry Nirvana was the message:

LEGENDS HOLD THAT IF U SHARE A DOUBLE STRAWBERRY WITH SOMEONE, U TWO WILL FALL IN LUV XOXO

"That's not a fact, that's an urban legend," Roxas said loudly, raising his voice as he scanned his surrounding, and sure enough, there was Axel standing next to a Jamba Juice stand, looking redheaded and Canadian.

"It's a fact that the legend exists," he said laughingly as Roxas approached. His black eye hadn't yet faded.

"_Now_ it does. Is there something in particular you want with me, or did you just wake up this morning a more intrepid stalker than ever? "

"Or_ maybe_ I could just happen to be at this mall of my accord, at the same time that you happen to be here," Axel pointed out, raising an eyebrow innocently.

"Or maybe I _told you_ yesterday I would be here at this time," Roxas retorted.

The counter biscuit staffing the Jamba Juice shack chose that moment to sidle up to them and plant a huge plastic cup lovingly in front of Axel. "Here's your third Strawberry Nirvana," she simpered, batting her mascara-laden lashes rapidly. Up close, she really wasn't that pretty, Roxas decided. "Either you really love these, or this is _some_ date."

Axel dug for his wallet in an interestingly red-eared fashion. It was not a good look on him. "I don't know what you're talking about," he muttered.

"Right," Roxas said, and reached over to steal Axel's smoothie. He usually preferred Tahiti Green Tea himself, but somebody had to prevent Axel from burning a hole in his esophagus from all that juicy deliciousness, clearly.

"Kids these days," Axel sighed in his dramatic diva way. "One day they're making noises about you being anorexic, and the next they're stealing food right from under your nose"

The shop girl giggled vapidly, seemingly overcome by this feeble display of wit. Axel smirked, and pocketed what appeared to be a slip of paper scribbled with—Roxas rolled his eyes—her phone number, before turning around with an easy smile.

"You wanna," he said vaguely, cocking his head, "you know, get out of here?"

"Yeah, sure," Roxas answered without thinking, without even a nanosecond of pause. Later, he might think back on this decision and be surprised at his own assertiveness, but in this moment, he was just glad, so immeasurably relieved for an excuse to remove himself from the crushing boredom of mere minutes ago.

He fell into step beside Axel, still slurping his ill-gotten drink, and then it was normal as normal, just another day in the life, and everything felt _right_, all the pieces in place.

And_ because_ it was a normal day in the life, they predictably only made it to the top of the escalators before Axel stopped in his track and spun around excitedly, arms wind-milling every which way. Roxas had to duck twice to avoid a head-on collision. Must be all the Jamba Juice.

"Almost forgot—I got something for you!"

Roxas blinked, and moved back just in time as an object was shoved into the space his nose had just been. It was book, small but fairly thick, dog-eared, old and worn and bound in black leather, with gold letterings on the jacket and spine.

"Robertson Davies's _The Cunning Man_," said Roxas, reading aloud from the cover.

"Thought it might suit you," Axel said, putting up an admirable but obviously fake air of nonchalance. "You wanted to know about Toronto, right? Well, you've never seen Toronto like it's written here. Since you're kind of weird and morbid--"

"I am not weird and morbid," Roxas said flatly.

"As I was _saying_," Axel went on emphatically, closing Roxas's fingers carefully around the book. "Someone needs to get a proper jumpstart on your Canadian literature education before you hit upon Margaret Atwood and start taking up feminist activism or something, and seeing as nobody else in the immediate vicinity seems properly equipped for the task, that someone might as well be me."

"Your concern, it's touching," Roxas deadpanned. Then he cleared his throat, and said, in a slightly mollified tone, "I mean, thanks. This is—great. I don't know what to say."

"Rendered you speechless, did I?"

"Yeah, like that's a momentous feat," Roxas snorted. He ran a thumb slowly over the book's worn jacket, his mind awash in a nameless feeling. Flipping through the first few pages, he noticed briefly that there was a personal inscription, penned discreetly in a corner of the leaf.

Axel was still beaming down at him, obviously pleased with himself, and it took a second before Roxas realized, with a distinct tinge of horror, that they were kind of having a moment here.

Then a familiar camo shirt and an equally familiar flippy hairdo appeared in the distance, and just like that, the moment was kaput'd.

o0o

"Oh shit," muttered Roxas, frantically searching for a suitable hiding place. None of his friends—Hayner in the lead, with Olette and Pence a few steps behind—had spotted him yet, but if he didn't get out of the way it was only a matter of time.

"What's the matter?" Axel asked, puzzled.

"Get over here." Roxas grabbed his hand and dragged him forcefully into a photo booth he'd spied three steps to their left.

"Hey, I haven't seen one of these in forever," Axel exclaimed in delight.

"Don't you ever stop yapping?" Roxas hissed, pulling the black curtain shut behind them.

"Ooh, are we hiding from those guys? Should have gone to Toys "R" Us, they got those giant dollhouses…"

"_Shut up_."

From beyond the curtain, he could hear the chattering voices of Hayner and Olette, interspersed by Pence's soft murmuring. There couldn't be two feet in distance between them. Roxas didn't realize he hadn't been breathing until the sounds of their voices had died off completely. He heaved a long exhale in relief.

"Say cheese, Roxas."

"What the--" He felt an arm slung around his shoulder, and instantly, four blinding flashes flared up in quick succession, effectively blinding him for a good three minutes.

He rubbed the dizzying starbursts out of his eyes in time to see Axel rip the strip of black and white prints from the dispenser, inspecting it thoughtfully. "Classic," he chucked, holding the photos out for Roxas to see. "I'm devastatingly handsome as usual, and you look like a sufferer of hemorrhoids."

"Quit it," Roxas snapped, grabbing the prints from Axel brusquely. "Will you stop messing around for one second? _God_."

Axel gave him a funny look. "Alright. But mind telling me exactly who those kids were that you so loathed to see? Bullies from school?"

"Don't be dumb. They're my friends, but if Olette sees me with some tall skinny redhead wearing green Converse, she'll…"

"Wait," Axel interrupted, eyes narrowing. "Those were your _friends_?"

"I_ just_ told you," Roxas said impatiently. "Anyway, they should be gone now, so if we—hey, where do you think you're going?"

And for the second time that week, Axel was walking away from him for no apparent reason. He just kept walking, and didn't answer when Roxas called his name, didn't even turn around. Growling in frustration, Roxas doggedly chased after him, throwing a quick look over his shoulder to make sure his friends were truly out of sight.

"Axel, hold up!"

Not the faintest sign of acknowledgement. This had officially shot straight past unreasonable, beyond ridiculous, and into really stupid territory.

"Stop," Roxas said, grabbing Axel's arm as he caught up with him, panting. "The hell's your problem?"

"I don't have a problem," Axel grunted stiffly, wrenching himself from Roxas's grasp. He made a sour face, eyes shadowed. "_You're_ the one with the problem."

"What?"

"What are you still doing here, anyway? If you're so ashamed to be seen with me, why don't you go back to your _real_ friends?"

He had a vague, but supremely bad feeling about this. "What are you talking about?"

"What am I talking about?" Axel exploded, all fire, and people scattered quickly from them. "How about the fact that you're only nice and pleasant and sweetheart when no one else is around--"

Roxas panicked. This could only be going one way.

"—and let's not forget the cuddling session yesterday, what was _that_ about?"

Crap. Axel had totally noticed.

"That wasn't what you think it was," Roxas stammered, debating between hyperventilating or killing Axel for his silence or just leaving the country now, assume a different identity and make a new life for himself elsewhere, far, _far_ away from here.

Axel made a bitter, derisive noise. "Right. And just what am I supposed to think?"

Roxas made a meaningless gesture that amounted to flapping his hands around. "Look, I was just—back there I was trying to--"

"Try_ this_."

Roxas wasn't sure what happened next, because Axel was moving like lightning, utilizing all of his God-given agility to outwit and slip under Roxas's defenses, coming up fast with a hand on the back of Roxas's neck and the other clamped around his shoulder blade, forceful, pulling him up and _kissing him_.

It seemed like the kind of kiss that would flit away almost immediately, closed-mouth and chaste, lips soft, but somewhere within the first second Axel had a change of heart and knotted his fingers into Roxas's hair in a way that should hurt but didn't, parted Roxas's lips with a forceful tongue and sliding it over the line of his teeth. Appropriately, he kissed like he lived, confident and skilled and with a heartbreaking sort of recklessness—scraping his teeth along Roxas's lower lip and sucking at it a little. Everyone in the mall was probably staring at them now, or maybe they weren't, Roxas's brain was too busy going adjhf;jklklsfh to decide for sure.

People were always talking about kisses being stolen in books and movies, but Roxas had never had the faintest idea what they meant until now. Because Axel was definitely stealing this kiss—had picked a lock or smashed in a window or _something_, was probably peddling it halfway to Vancouver by now, if that made any sense, and really, not much did. Not right at this second, because Axel's mouth was soft and vivid and overwhelming, the hint of cloves like a smoky-sweet bite beneath his tongue, at once a bitter candy and a culmination of many rocky build-ups.

But all in all, it couldn't have lasted more than twenty seconds, and then empty space was rushing in between them, and Roxas looked up to find the most horrifying expression he had ever seen on Axel's face—horrifying because it was almost open and honest, a blur of anger and disappointment and dark traces of whatever else Axel might be feeling that didn't wholly make it to the surface.

"Yeah," said Axel, looking away quickly. "I didn't think so."

And then he stepped onto the crowded escalator, and was nearly out of sight by the time Roxas gathered his five remaining synapses together and began yelling hoarsely after him.

"Axel!_ Axel_!"

Axel resolutely did not turn around. More people pushed past Roxas to get on the escalator, and in a moment, he was completely hidden from view.

o0o

When Roxas was in the fifth grade, he was once sent home in the middle of the day after allegedly engaging in a vicious hair-pulling scrimmage that had left half of his homeroom class in tears and the other half cowering behind the teacher's desk, all because one kid had had the misfortune to wreck the science fair project he had worked for-freaking-ever on.

Since it was an isolated incident, and he had admittedly been provoked, his parents were able to convince the school to leave it off his permanent records, but nonetheless, everyone began looking at him differently in its wake, wary of that dangerous streak, that ability of his to lash out in terrible misplaced anger without a single warning, a sudden, violent storm.

Some things did not apparently improve with age.

When Roxas finally managed to wrestle his way through the madding crowd in the busy food court and locate his friends, Hayner and Pence just took one look at his face before sharing a brief wide-eyed look between themselves and scooting back slightly in their seats.

"You alright?" Pence asked, voice tight and measured, treading lightly.

"Yeah, fine," Roxas muttered, feeling anything but. He ground his fists into his eyes angrily—maybe if he wished hard enough this day would be over and he would be in bed again. "Where's Olette?"

"Getting food," said Hayner, pushing his fries toward Roxas like making an offering. His expression was, for once, thoughtful. "You want something?"

"No, I'm not hungry." Like he could eat now, with the horrible feeling in his stomach eating up space like some kind of ravenous black hole. He was so far from alright, he'd have to catch a plane and call long-distance. His fingers found a hapless paper napkin, and began tearing at it viciously.

Hayner frowned. "You don't look good, Rox. Maybe you should go home and re--" but he was interrupted by Olette, who dropped down at their table at that moment, carrying a heavy tray piled high with greasy paper boxes.

"There you are, Roxas," she said brightly, carefree and high-spirited. "We were wondering where you'd disappeared to."

What came next could only be termed as disaster personified.

Just another minute, and Pence could have given her a warning look, or else she would have noticed the leaden tension herself, but that didn't happen, and Olette went on happily, "So I was thinking, since neither Hayner nor Pence will be doing Junior Prom, maybe you and Anna could double up with me and Rai and we could…"

"Or how about no, Olette," Roxas snapped. Pence winced, and Hayner narrowed his eyes over his sports drink. It was early afternoon, and the food court was still very crowded, people milling in and out and making the whole place claustrophobic.

Olette's eyes went very wide and opaque, and she let her mouth hang open for a long moment before speaking. "Excuse me?"

"I said I don't want to double date with you and your boyfriend," Roxas said sharply. "I don't want to talk to you about Anna, I don't want you two to meet and braid each other's hair, and I'm sick of you bringing this up every two seconds. Is that clear enough for you?"

Olette's face went slack for a moment, pale and lost and horrible, but she seemed to shake herself out of it and bounce back almost immediately, eyes flashing as she muttered, "Well, I'm so very sorry I made the mistake of caring about your sorry ass. Remind me to never do that again."

Her tone was furious, but her voice was thick and blurred, consonants watery around the edges, and she looked to be fighting back tears, which made Roxas bite his lips, hard enough to draw blood. This was wrong—it wasn't fair and he wasn't being her friend.

But it wasn't enough. The flood gates had already been opened and it just wasn't enough, and it was like someone else was talking now, some other person using his voice, sarcastic and cutting and deliberately mean, "That would be great—just terrific, really."

"Quit it, Roxas," Hayner said suddenly, cold and businesslike. "You're out of line."

That, if nothing else, brought him up short, because it had been nothing short of a geologic eon since the last time Hayner had been forced to drop his casual demeanor in the company of friends. He had mellowed out plenty in high school, but it was as though beneath that bright exterior of babbling energy and hyperactive tendencies was still that boy leader of sandbox gangs, back from a time when it was just him and Olette and Pence, when Rai had been nobody's boyfriend and a dispute with Seifer could be settled with a foam sword to the head.

A time before _me_, Roxas realized, and that thought made him go cold suddenly, floundering without anchorage.

"You know what, I don't need this bullshit," Roxas bit out angrily, jumping out of his seat, and for a moment, the world wobbled and he almost couldn't breathe. "Screw all of you."

And this time, it was his turn to stalk away as Pence called his name forlornly after his retreating back.

o0o

It was, all things considered, not his finest hour.

And then, there was this.

"Roxas?" His dad called, stepping out of the living room and catching Roxas in the act of trying to sneak up to his room. "What are you doing home? Shouldn't you be at work?"

"I don't feel well," Roxas lied. His dad frowned.

"Is everything alright? Do you need anything?"

"Yeah. I'm just going to go lie down for a bit, I'll be fine."

"You sure? Is there anything you want to talk about?"

"Not now, dad," Roxas muttered. "I don't need this right now." It never rained, but.

His dad was still staring at him, suspicious, and Roxas would give anything right now to be somewhere else, bullfighting in Spain or jumping out of an airplane window or dead in a ditch. It felt like his head was about to explode.

"You know you can come to talk to me about anything, right? Anything at all."

A small horrible part of his mind piped up with a flare of anger in his chest, asking what rights his father had to question his wellbeing, when he himself wasn't—when he himself refused to move on at all.

"The reason I have to ask is because I'm going to Boston again tomorrow, and unless you pull yourself together, I'm not sure I can trust you to be by yourself."

Couldn't trust _him_? Well, that was a laugh.

"Yeah, run away," Roxas muttered acidly, just loud enough to be heard. "Because that's what you're good at."

His dad's face closed over, crumpling into well-worn lines like a tired map. "I don't think I heard that correctly," he said, dangerously polite, so Roxas knew he was in it deep. "Would you care to repeat yourself?"

And then, something happened. Something snapped, and then he was spinning around, his head hot and furious and dizzy with it, gripping the banister until the white bones of his knuckles popped against the pale skin. But worst of all, worst of all were the words coming out of his mouth, every single one of which sounded harsh and resentful and the worst kind of terrible, tainted by the toxins buried deep in the landfill of his heart.

"I'm saying that if being my father is so hard, perhaps you should just drop it altogether! Because it's not like you've been doing such a stellar job since mom died! You don't touch me, you can't even look at me without flinching—is that the reason you sent Naminé away? Is that why you go on these "business trips"—so you don't have to see my face?"

What did it matter anymore, he told himself. Since he was obviously out to earn the love and adoration of everyone in his life, perhaps he should go ring up Naminé and yell at _her_ for good measure.

And the worst part of all was that his dad wasn't yelling back, didn't seem to react at all. His father wasn't the shouting type, he didn't have the erstwhile fuse that Roxas was plagued with. Few things provoked him, one of which was irresponsible environmental laws, and another was childish tantrums, but even in anger, he would never raise his voice, just go real quiet. In some ways, that was much harder to bear.

It was enough, more than enough. Hayner was right. He was out of line.

And he wanted to take it back, but the problem was that he didn't know how to. He didn't know how to stop being like this, didn't know how to stop being angry, how to stop taking it so personally all the time, and it was like this was a year ago all over again and his mom had just died all over and everybody else was in the distant, left on the far side of the shore, while Roxas was all alone on an island bounded by sunlight and grief, playing his mother's old records and growing brighter but colder as the loneliness swallowed him whole.

"Go to your room," his dad said quietly, cold with anger. "I don't want to see you again until dinnertime."

"At least now you're honest about it," Roxas shouted, and stomped up the stairs as quickly as his angry feet would carry him, wanting nothing more than to be out of sight of his dad's awful eyes and his awful tight face and—worst of all—his palpable disappointment.

The moment his door had slammed safely shut behind him, he threw himself on the floor and stared silently at the ceiling, where the light was shifting golden through the open blinds and the shadows were starting to lengthen as the day aged. He tried to regulate his breathing, but his chest just tremored with every inhalation, and he felt so sick and weary and defeated that he could throw up in his mouth and drown on it.

In just a week, his whole life had completely spun of control.

**TBC**

* * *

**A/N: **Short chapter. Short and hurtful. So. What'd you guys think?

Also, since the story is in its sixth chapter and kind of standing on its own now, I want to try something. I'd really like to **get to know my readers**, so if you would tell me a shortish something about yourself in a comment, that would be terrific. Suggestions about the story are welcome too.


	7. Chapter VII

**Title:** My Girlfriend, Who Lives In Canada

**Pairings:** Axel/Roxas, Olette/Rai, SoRiKai

**Disclaimer:** The Kingdom Hearts franchise and its characters do not belong to me.

**Summary:** Roxas has a pretend girlfriend. People give him shit about it. In more ways than one.

* * *

**VII.**

The week that followed was tense and quiet and brimming with self-loathing.

Roxas's dad apparently decided that grinding away his soul at yet another class action deposition in Boston was infinitely preferable to engaging in fruitless attempts at reaching out to a sulky teenager, and so drove off on his week-long trip as scheduled. They exchanged curt farewells at the door—mumbled words, minimal eye contact—and then Roxas had the pleasure of watching the Ford Taurus speeding away down the street post-haste, as though his father couldn't wait to get away from him.

Too bad he himself couldn't afford the same luxury, because high school transformed over the next few days from a series of dreary, unbroken monotony into a series of dreary, unbroken monotony but that was also more similar to a certified war zone, with sharp, accusatory looks replacing landmines around every bright and cheery corner.

It was a good thing he had managed to patch things up with Pence—"Caught in a tangled web of your own lies, I thought that was enough poetic justice."—and Hayner—"No, man, it's totally cool, I just wanted you to chill, you know? No hard feelings? Me? No way! You? Cool, you want to maybe shoot some hoops after school?"—before the first day was out, because when you were in a hot mess, it was good to have allies.

Of course, all it took was Olette sharply turning her shoulder on him with a coldly impersonal, "Excuse me," when he tried to approach her at lunch, to remind Roxas that, yeah, baby boy, it wasn't going to be that easy.

Trying to get any time alone with Olette these days seemed like an exercise in futility. Whenever she wasn't in class, she was usually in the company of her harpy posse—uh, girlfriends, or embroiled in yet another heated discussion with the Junior Prom Committee. Clearly the stress of turning up the fabulous level of the upcoming event and possibly putting the senior class to shame was getting to her, Roxas noted hopelessly. As the days crawled by, Olette was often seen tromping through the hallways looking like she hadn't seen a pillow in 72 hours and snarling at anyone who dared approach her in this delicate state, which was limited to Rai and the criminally stupid. Faint distinction, as it were.

"I wouldn't say that within her earshot," Pence advised, watching from a distance as Olette tore one of her committee underlings a new one, five tables away. "Not when you're trying to get back into her good graces and all."

"For the love of God," Roxas said, pushing the peas and carrots on his tray around angrily. "I know I was in the wrong back there, but exactly how long am I supposed to be in the doghouse for?" He paused, and made a jabbing motion with his spork for emphasis. "Besides, it was _so_ not entirely my fault."

Pence looked as if he wanted to argue, but soon thought better of it. He shrugged, and found a better use for his attention in a fruit cup. Further down the table, Hayner was engaged in some kind of silent obscene gesture contest with—who else—Seifer all the way across the room. Roxas rolled his eyes, and was amused to see Fuu, the girl sitting beside Seifer, do the same. No doubt about it, lunch hour had gotten a lot less exciting since Olette had stopped coming round to browbeat them into doing things her way.

o0o

By Friday afternoon, this thing with Olette had still not blown over, and his dad still hadn't called. As the silence grew longer, Roxas began to seriously fear that things were never going to be the same again around here. Which would make him the profound moron who had estranged his father and one of his best friends because he couldn't keep a leash on his drama queen tendencies--

"The offer still stands, Roxas. You know I don't usually go for kicked puppies, but between us friends, I'll be glad to make an exception."

Which would make him the profound moron who had estranged his father and one of his best friends because he couldn't keep a leash on his drama queen tendencies, who had just been ass-slapped _and_ propositioned in a decidedly patronizing manner by his loopy female coworker.

"Thanks for the kind thought, Sally," Roxas mumbled, pushing his fists into his eyes so deeply he was seeing stars. "But I'm, uh, truly beyond help at this point, and it wouldn't be nice to give Stanley a premature heart attack."

Sally nodded in apparent understanding, and leaned one elbow on the counter to survey Roxas with a look of deep concern, while somewhere close by a customer was making enraged noises about wanting his macchiato ten minutes ago. Sally must have gotten new medications recently or something, because her crazy had mellowed considerably. "Well, if you ever feel like, you know. _Talking about it_."

"Yeah, no," Roxas said quickly, shuddering at the emphasis. Her scrutiny was feeding his week-long migraine, which he had named 'Axel' in a fit of masochism, what with the classic model no longer being around to personally inflict pain.

That was the other part of the problem.

After the incident in the mall on Sunday, Axel had fallen off the face of the Earth. In order to do so, all he'd had to do was stop texting. It wasn't until he had gone three whole days without being rudely interrupted in a moment of rest or work or breathing by the slow shrieking version of Katamari on the Rocks that Roxas was forced to reexamine the limitations of "no question, no lies". That was when he realized that, up until this point, he had never actually tried to _directly_ contact Axel.

Their SMS system had seemed above reproach—Axel would send messages, and Roxas would make faces at them. They had never even spoken over the phone, and come to think of it, there would never have been any real opportunity for Roxas to return Axel's texts at all, unless he had ever had to take a rain check. The fact that there had never _been_ a rain check either meant that Axel had known Roxas's schedule like the back of his hand, or that Roxas had always made a point to be available. If you wanted to be overly analytical about it.

And now, after five days of unnerving silence, Roxas had broken all of his rules—rules that he hadn't known existed—in one fell swoop. He had texted. He had called. All to no avail—his messages went unanswered and no matter how many times he pressed speed dial three, all he got for his troubles was a prerecorded message telling him that the person he was trying to call could not be reached at the moment. After awhile, the paranoid-narcissist in him pointed out that either Axel was blocking his calls, or he had changed his number altogether. Short of passing out flyers on the Amherst campus—and it had taken inhuman force of will to talk himself out of _that_ idea—there was no chance of rushing Axel out any time soon.

"Why do you care?" Roxas muttered, rubbing his forehead. "You're losing _your goddamn mind_." Of which talking to himself was surely the first sign.

Even if he could somehow reach Axel and miraculously find him in the mood to talk, it wasn't as if he would know what to say. In fact, Roxas thought furiously, it should by all rights be _him_ putting up the cold front in this particular fallout. After all, he hadn't been the one to totally freak out in the mall for no good reason (for the most part—he wasn't going to get into that headache) and then storm out of there into the great beyond. But, as usual, Axel had somehow found a way to make this all about him. Except now, instead of picturing Axel being a filthy slut in skeezy sorority houses, Roxas had a whole other set of… concerns.

In fact, there was the chance he would never see Axel again, for all that Amherst was practically the size of a peanut. He should probably give up and get on with his life. Or what was left of it. He was getting sick of telling people it wasn't all his fault.

o0o

But then it was 8 am on Saturday morning and Roxas found himself sitting on the waiting bench outside the train station concentrating all rationales on trying to convince himself that his being there was totally not the latest installment in a multi-part series involving him trolling all of their old haunts in the vain hope of running into Axel, and then things were back exactly where they had started.

Frankly, that vain hope was becoming very vain indeed, and the fact that it was a mockingly beautiful day just somehow served to compound all this. All was quiet; the first train wouldn't be arriving until well after 9 o'clock, and the station was completely deserted. It was warm and breezy and the sky was crisp, blue enough to be narcotic, but though it seemed easy enough to blink the morning sunshine out of his eyes and lose himself in that not-yet-punishing summer heat, Roxas was oddly agitated. He'd be damned before admitting that he was missing the smell of cigarette smoke, however.

"This is so stupid," Roxas said aloud, and brusquely got to his feet, knocking his backpack over and onto the ground in the process. He hadn't realized the zipper had been open all along until all the contents of the bag came spilling out onto the dirty platform. Lovely.

Roxas was already on his knees in the dust, shoveling notebooks and pencils back into his bag and condemning this entire shitty week in his mind, when something caught his eye. Half peeking out of the bag was a small leatherbound book, and Roxas let out a breath he hadn't known he had been holding when he saw '_The Cunning Man_ by Robertson Davies' in gold on the front cover. With everything else going on, he had forgotten all about the book, and it had evidently been buried at the bottom of his backpack since last Sunday.

_("You wanted to know about Toronto, right? Well, you've never seen Toronto like it's written here.")_

Suddenly, Roxas was very aware of the day's stillness, as though the very air molecules around him had stopped moving. Still kneeling on the platform, he held the book in both hands. Then he shifted his palms, and succumbing to gravity, the pages parted and fell open to a somewhat middle-ish part. Roxas felt the breath catch in his chest again when he found the strip of black and white prints from the photobooth, now nestled firmly in the crook of the yellowing pages. He had forgotten about that, too.

Axel hadn't been lying. In all four pictures, Roxas's monochrome face had a particularly constipated tinge. Axel's wore its usual best look of manic glee. _So that's what it looks like_, he thought. The moment right before everything fell apart. It was always a somber feeling, staring into the face of what you have lost.

Blinking quickly, Roxas removed the photo strip and stuck it at the very back of the novel. Then he turned back to the first pages, and there, found something else he hadn't before noticed. On one of the blank pages, penned neatly in a corner, was an inscription written in black ink and an elegant cursive hand. Roxas frowned to himself. He read it quickly, and filed the message away for later consideration.

_Dec 1980,_

_To Addie: without you, I shudder to think._

_Love, DB._

o0o

"Look, you're supposed to be my support system in a time of crisis here, so don't just sit there and tell me it's all my fault!"

On the computer screen, Naminé sighed quietly, giving him a mild but faintly pitying look. "I'd love to be supportive, Roxas, but I don't think lying to your face is going to do any good right now. I can't believe you said those things to Dad."

Roxas glared at her viciously. "Whose side are you on anyway?" He shoved another glazed Krispy Kreme into his mouth, saw that it was the last in the box, and glared some more.

"I'm on no one's side," Naminé said sternly. She was frowning, which was all kinds of wrong. "Is that all you've been eating?"

"Your point?" Roxas challenged around a mouthful of sugary dough.

After blowing up at his dad and subsequently setting the emotional progress of their relationship back by about a million years, he'd been understandably depressed and had spent a lot of time sitting around the house writing bad poetry and exercising his teenage metabolism with junk food. It wasn't like someone was going to suddenly pop up with coupons and offers of nourishing sushi these days.

Naminé actually seemed to be _rolling her eyes_. "Add fifteen cups of coffee a day, and you and Dad might just have invented the new Atkins."

"You've been talking to Dad?" Roxas asked, narrowing his eyes. Then he coughed for no particular reason, and said in low tones, "Does he ask about me?"

In lieu of answering, his sister just gave him this disbelieving, patently "What do you think?" kind of look. "And before you ask," she said, "No. I'm not going to play messenger for you guys to work out all your ridiculousness. Call him yourself if you want to talk."

"Who said I wanted to talk?" Roxas shot back defensively. "I don't want to talk to him, and it was _not_ all my fault. I don't know if you realize it or not, Nam, but if you think about it, I wasn't totally talking out of my ass, okay? Maybe some of those things I said _deserved_ to be said."

It was a good thing, Roxas later reflected, that they hadn't yet invented a way for disappointment to kill, because the look of disapproval Naminé was giving him could stop a bull's heart right now. She kept on staring, eyes wide and sinking and oddly dark, and when she finally spoke, her soft voice was heavy, iron and steel where it was usually air and light.

"You're the wordsmith in the family, Roxas, so you should know this better than anyone. Just because something is the truth doesn't always mean it _should_ be said."

The really horrible thing about this was: he did know better. Always had.

"Please, Naminé," Roxas said, and wasn't surprised when it came out like a plea. "I—I just can't, okay? Not now."

Naminé had her hands over her face, and when she pulled them away, her cheeks were pink and blotchy, and suddenly her voice had quickened, thick and hushlike, watery. "I'm sorry. I don't want you to feel like I'm not being there for you. I've been trying to talk to Dad, too. He should call you, he shouldn't even have left like that."

Roxas closed his eyes, and fought to suppress a snarl. There was that sinking feeling again, all too familiar, rising up all around him. The feeling of being shipwrecked.

His sister was still talking, now barely above a whisper. "The thing is, I don't know if I'm getting through to you guys anymore. You and Dad, it's just like—just like before. Things were getting better, I could see it, but now you're all closed up again, just like that time right before you got suspended and everything went wrong, and—_I'm really scared_, Roxas."

"_Come on_, Nam," Roxas burst out, meeting her eyes and holding the gaze. "Come the fuck on. We've talked about this before. This is real life, remember? Let's not turn this into some crazy overwrought drama. We're all smarter than this, right?"

He finally tore his eyes away from the screen, and had the impression that, on the other end, Naminé was doing the same. They both needed a moment.

"Now you know why we don't talk more often," Roxas said, in an attempt to lighten things. "Every single one of our conversations always ends the same way."

"That's not really funny," his sister chided. Quietly, but calmly. It made him smile.

"It kind of is, actually."

"Well, we'll just have to persevere until we get it right," Naminé said, and he saw the corner of her mouth lift. "In the mean time, please eat something that takes more than five minutes to prepare."

Roxas raised his eyebrow. "Like you should talk. Have you seen a bowl of soup recently, because your shoulder blades are looking like they could cut cheese right about now."

Naminé smiled, a little wanly. "Well. It _is_ the last week of May."

"Ah," nodded Roxas. "That explains it."

The last week of May was exams week at Artsy Chicks Academy, so in the past Roxas had come to expect his sister's appearance in various states of paint-streaked exhaustion, kept going solely by the buzz from accidentally inhaling too much chemical fumes. He silently hoped they wouldn't have to stage an intervention for Naminé when she came home for summer vacation. He could practically smell the paint thinner from where he sat.

Roxas stared discreetly into the computer screen, past Naminé's huge, shadowed eyes, over her left shoulder (which _was_ looking extra pointy). Her sophomore year project was looking nearly consummate, a magnificent study in grace. Softly, his heart rose in a surge of pride.

"You have paint in your hair."

"Again?" Naminé sighed morosely, tugging at her pale blonde plait. "That's the third time today."

o0o

After that somewhat disastrous conversation with Naminé, Roxas had nearly resigned himself to the life of an emotional cripple and social pariah who would one day no doubt pen a bitter and effusive tome of literary genius. It was Monday night, just shy of seven, and he was a third of the way into _The Cunning Man_—the Bad Breath Contest was just commencing, i.e. unrivaled hilarity—when in a new and perverse twist, things started to turn around.

"You got into a car crash!"

"Let's not get ahead of ourselves," his dad said over the phone, sounding subdued and somewhat sheepish. "It was really more like a fender bender."

"_More like__ a fender bender_?" Roxas balked, gripping the phone tightly so that he wouldn't 'accidentally' punch something. "What is that supposed to mean? Christ, are you okay? When did this happen?"

"I'm fine," his dad reassured him. "I got back from the hospital two hours ago. I may have to keep this wrist brace on for a few days, but—no permanent damage that we know of."

Very calmly, Roxas took a minute to check and make sure that he hadn't hyperventilated and passed out at the mentions of 'wrist brace' and 'damage'. He went on, still preternaturally calm, "Are you sure that's all?" and surely, _surely_ his dad had to know where this was going. After all, the man had given Roxas his y chromosome.

"Well," his dad went on, almost hesitating. "The car wasn't quite as fortunate."

"Really?" said Roxas, his voice so light and squeaky it might float away from him any moment now. "How so?"

"I believe I may need a new one," his father said earnestly. Then he said, "I think all those years of being the only Ford in a parking lot full of BMWs cursed it," at which point Roxas promptly and totally lost his shit.

"Why the hell didn't you call until now?" he bellowed into the phone, so loudly that his voice resounded through the empty house. In a strange, slightly comical moment, he imagined his dad wincing and jerking away from his phone on the other end of the line.

If Roxas had stopped to consider things, he probably would have noticed how much this seemed like an eerie reminder of the last time they'd talked. But the point was that he hadn't, and by now his dad must have discerned from Roxas's voice that he was on the verge of an impending stroke, because he said quickly, in a mollifying voice, "It wasn't very serious, and I didn't want you to worry."

"Not serious!" God, he could go blind. "What do you mean not serious? Your car was totaled!"

"My car was not totaled," his dad soothed. "I'm really okay, Rox."

In the brief but palpable silence that followed, Roxas grappled with his breathing and used every ounce of strength in his soul to keep himself from actually passing out. Then, now authentically calm, he rubbed his temple and whispered into the phone, "I'm really glad to hear that. Really. You should have called. Let me worry, it's my job."

"I think you've got that a little backward there, buddy," his dad said, laughing a little, and finally, _finally_ the edge left their conversation. Roxas could shudder with relief. He imagined a dimly lit hotel room and his father with his wrist in a blue brace sitting on the bed with the duvet cover half tossed off, grinning into his Blackberry, and then he was smiling himself. It was difficult to think that they had spent the last seven days in virtual non communicado.

"So the long and short of it is that I'm going to have to stay out here for a few more days," his dad explained. "Not enough time to buy a new car, but I have to stick around until the insurance company gets back to me. Think you can hold the fort awhile longer?"

Roxas laughed by way of answering. "Are you shitting me?" he asked, not bothering to cover his language.

His dad pretended not to have heard. "I think I'll catch the afternoon train back on Saturday. Can't miss the Junior Prom."

"Oh please," Roxas scoffed. "Don't make me puke."

There was rejoining laughter on the other end. Then, John Van Leeuwen cleared his throat and said, "Hey, buddy. About last week."

Roxas blinked, and didn't speak. Only when he was certain that the current in their conversation hadn't changed for the worse did he say, "You don't have to say anything. It was all my fault. I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said those things. I didn't mean any of it."

"No," his dad said mildly. "I think you did mean some of it—and I think that's alright. And it was not all your fault."

Roxas closed his eyes and leaned his head against his headboard, cradling the phone lightly. "You're the only one who thinks that."

"I know I haven't been doing the best I can," his dad went on, sounding tired and sad and almost guilty. "Since your mother passed away, things have changed a lot for you and your sister. I should have done better for the both of you."

"I think you _did_ the best you could, Dad," Roxas said, keeping his eyes shut. "But both of us can stand to do a little better in the future." Again, he thought about his dad, alone in a Boston hotel room. If he were there, Roxas would want to hold his hand, and maybe his dad would ruffle his hair, say, "I miss you." Maybe.

"That's what I like to hear," his dad told him. "And now, we act like gentlemen and pretend none of this ever happened?"

Roxas laughed. "That'll drive Naminé round the bend for sure." Then he added, "So, are you going to get a BMW?"

His dad made a wounded noise. "Only if you want me to become yet another symbol of conformity and bad taste. I'm thinking of getting that gold Miata I've been saving for my fiftieth birthday slash midlife crisis. Think that'll piss the suits off as much as the Taurus used to?"

"Sure," Roxas said, still cracking up. "You can name it Rosalina."

o0o

On Friday morning, when Roxas trudged to school like going on a death march and arrived almost an hour late, he came to discover that:

a/ The banners advertising the Junior Prom on Saturday were still as ugly and obnoxious as ever.

b/ Prior to his arrival, Olette and Rai had engaged in an epic blowout fight outside the computer lab, during which Olette had thrown a calculator and they had broken up.

c/ Rai had been last seen in complete hysterics being escorted down the hall to the counselor's office. Olette, shattered though slightly more dignified, had been swiftly whisked away by her loyal def posse.

The word on campus was that Rai had been seen making out with Candi the vampish cheerleader and Roxas's former number one fangirl, which Roxas immediately concluded was a total and complete lie, and not just because he had seen with his own eyes the look of starstruck-puppy adoration on Rai's face whenever he had faithfully sat at Olette's feet. Still, for Candi's sake, he hoped her friends had had the wisdom to remove her to an undisclosed location. Sooner or later, Olette was bound to get her hands on something sturdier than a Texas Instrument.

All this was related to him by Kairi, who had decided to join Roxas in skipping gym.

Apparently, due to Candi's rumored transgression, the cheerleading squad was in complete upheaval (moving the offender to Siberia, no doubt), and Kairi figured she couldn't work up the energy to deal with so much estrogen-fueled hijinks this early in the day. He was just trying to hide from all the tacky Junior Prom decorations. They sat outside the boiler room and passed back and forth a bottle of grape soda.

"So, do you think he really did it?"

Roxas shook his head. "Not a chance. Rai worships Olette. You should have seen the singing Valentine last February."

Kairi furrowed her pretty brows, and said, "I know it sounds horrible, but things like this make me feel bad for being a girl. Even Riku in his worst hissy fit and Sora on his most clueless day _combined_ isn't half as bad as this."

Roxas gave her a curious look, and slanted away quickly, but Kairi must have noticed him staring because she smiled and said leniently, "It's okay. You can ask, you know. I know everyone at school thinks I'm dating the both of them."

"Well," Roxas demurred, a little embarrassed. What was he supposed to say?

Kairi rearranged her long legs in front of her, and stole back the soda from Roxas. She stared into the bottle, and said, "Did you know that, once, when we were all out to dinner together, this waitress pulled me aside and completely chewed me out? She said I should be ashamed of myself for leading those two nice boys on."

Roxas hadn't known that, but he did know that people in school sometimes referred to Kairi as the redheaded filling in a very nutritionally unbalanced sandwich, and he had no idea how she could stand to deal with all that. If somebody had said that about one of _his_ friends, he would have punched the motherfucker in the mouth.

He made a mental note to start doing that from now on.

"So," he prodded tentatively. "What's the truth?"

Kairi smiled again, a tiny, secretive quirk of her lips. "The truth is that they're my best friends in the world." Her voice was light and airy, seeming to drift in and out. "They were the first friends I made when my family moved to Amherst three years ago, and you know what that's like."

Roxas nodded. "You're grateful for them, but at the same time, you always feel a little like an intruder. Someone who lives on the periphery."

Kairi was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "Sora and Riku, they've known each other all their lives. They practically grew up together, playing as well as competing. You know how some people just kind of complete each other? That's them. More than just the best of friends. That's the kind of connection they have. Who wouldn't envy that?"

"I used to know a guy like that," Roxas said abruptly, surprising himself. "Back in New York. We went to the same prep school."

Kairi looked at him sideways with a considering expression.

"Liam," he continued, staring straight ahead. "That's his name. He was a year ahead of me in school."

Liam had curly brown hair and dark, animated eyes that a hack writer would describe was 'always twinkling with mischief', a Greek nose on a Byronic face. He was the captain of the swimming team and the captain of the debate team on top of being completely brilliant at all things involving quantitative reasoning. In the winter, he was always losing his uniform blazer, and his tie was eternally a wreck. By his sophomore year, he had been voted 'Most Likely To Rule The World'.

"You keep using the past tense," Kairi pointed out. "What happened to Liam?"

Roxas didn't meet her eyes. "We had a major fallout right before I moved here", he said shortly. "I haven't really talked to him since."

"Boys are stupid," Kairi said. Mildly. Almost _knowingly_. "No offense," she added, smiling.

"None taken," he said, grinning back at her. "Anyway, it's probably true."

Kairi leaned her head back against the door and blinked up at him earnestly. She had eyes that were the color of the ocean off the coast of Cape Cod on sunny winter days, and her smile made them dance, brought out something from their quiet blue depths, some flatly nonjudgmental quality that reminded him, more than anything, of his sister Naminé.

It was that same wash of warmth that radiated from the soft voice, the easy touch, some kind of weird female je ne sais quoi that he didn't get but found oddly comforting anyway.

He thought wearily of Olette, white and shaking and brittle-jawed in the mall's food court. So the women in his life might be unfathomable and meddlesome. That didn't mean he didn't need them, didn't miss having them around, didn't feel the yawning loss.

"You're thinking about Olette," Kairi said.

"What, can you read my mind?" Roxas joked, nabbing the soda bottle.

"Don't have to. It's written all over your face. Quit stalling already," she laughed, nudging him to his feet. "I'm not the girl you should be talking to. Go." She narrowed her eyes, and added, "_Now_."

"Right," he said, nodding slowly as he backed away, "Right," and added, as an afterthought, "Thanks, Kairi. That was a nice talk. I mean it."

"Right back at you," she said, and gave him an encouraging smile. "I guess this means the Roxas Redemption Arc is finally coming to an end, huh?"

"_God_, I really hope so."

**TBC**

* * *

**A/N: **So I know Axel wasn't in this chapter at all, what's up with that, but I hope you guys still paid some attention to the other peasants, because the chapter is kind of important. Some details will become important to the storyline in time. Still, no Axel is... yeah. But hey, if you're sweet to me, there might be a surprise waiting in the next chapter.

On a cooler note, please check out the fantabulous art of "Anna" that the amazing **arcthelove** created. Go to her deviantART gallery. Go. RIGHT NOW. I ain't saying more than that.


	8. Chapter VIII

**Title:** My Girlfriend, Who Lives In Canada

**Pairings:** Axel/Roxas, Olette/Rai, SoRiKai

**Disclaimer:** The Kingdom Hearts franchise and its characters do not belong to me.

**Summary:** Roxas has a pretend girlfriend. People give him shit about it. In more ways than one.

**Notes:** Axel returns, and he brings friends. Well, in a manner of speaking. (Pst, go to my livejournal post for this chapter later if you want to download the Feist song I quoted it here, which is all kinds of lovely. If you check the 'canadagf' tag, you might find some other interesting stuff as well.)

* * *

**VIII.**

- - -

"_One, two, three, four  
Tell me that you love me more  
Sleepless long nights  
That is what my youth was for…_

_Those teenage hopes who have tears in their eyes  
Too scared to own up to one little lie."_

(Feist, "1234")

- - -

The teacher had not yet arrived when Roxas entered the classroom, thank God for small blessings. He could not immediately locate Olette, though the huddle of loudly whispering girls at the back of the room gave him some clues that she might be possibly found somewhere within their tight enclave. Infiltration, then, was the only course of action, and Roxas heaved a small, bracing sigh before making a beeline for the group.

And was intercepted and nearly knocked over halfway across the room by a ball of raw panic clad in designer camo.

"I wouldn't go over there just now if I were you," Hayner whispered frantically, wild-eyed. "They've already got Pence."

A cursory glance vindicated his claim, as Pence was indeed sitting somewhat on the peripheries of the thick female wall, looking for all the world like he was wavering between supportive and scared out of his mortal mind.

"Can't help it," Roxas sighed. "Until you and I give Rai the pummeling he so justly deserves, this is the only way to make things right."

"You're a brave, brave man," Hayner said, laying his hand on Roxas's shoulder solemnly. "Personally, I'm glad you two are going to make nice with each other. You were always the one Olette did all the girly stuff with. Did you know the other day she came up and asked me if I wanted to go to the bookstore? _The bookstore_, honestly!"

Partly out of self-abuse, Roxas decided to let that comment slide for the time being.

The human wall kind of shifted in a decidedly hostile manner at his approach, but at least they hadn't started brandishing pepper spray and braying war cries or anything, so Roxas suppressed the urge to scamper in the opposite direction just long enough to cough quietly and say, "Olette, can I talk to you?"

All the girls began whispering in unanimously scandalized voices—perhaps they had expected him to grovel and beg for audience with their high priestess—but Pence gave him a sharp, questioning look. Upon catching Roxas's eyes, he nodded with a smile, and with a few subtle nudges, managed to get the crowd to part and reveal Olette, pale but determinedly composed, both her hands folded tightly on the desk in front of her.

Slowly, Roxas repeated his request, not taking his gaze off her for one moment.

"I'm sitting right in front of you," Olette said, staring straight ahead. Upon closer inspection, she looked tired and suspiciously red-eyed. "You can say whatever you want."

"I was thinking, outside," Roxas said patiently, wishing they could just skip this step and go for a triple-fudge sundae with extra cherries downtown, where they would trade dubious and scathing opinions of high school football and hobag cheerleaders until the smile came back to her eyes again. "Somewhere in private, maybe. Come on."

Something seemed to click, and Olette looked up at him sharply, searching and completely laid bare. Her gaze gave another twist to the tight knot that had formed in his throat. It felt like the first time they'd made eye contact in days.

"Okay," she said quietly, and got up without a further word. Immediately, the girls standing around them began buzzing in excitement, and Roxas had the sudden, depressing thought that this was going to be all over school tomorrow. Of course, he told himself immediately, short of at least a pregnancy scare or rumor of substance abuse, it wasn't as if the gossip mill could possibly paint him in a more tantalizing light than they already had.

o0o

They came out of the building into the bright sunshine, and started walking aimlessly down the main path leading away from campus central. Roxas quietly racked his brain, and remembered that behind the school, there was a fairly spacious window ledge that few people ever visited, where you could sit and have a private conversation. It was outside the back window of one of the first floor ceramic labs, ensuring that no one would be intruding at this time of day. He began walking briskly in that direction, and could hear Olette following, a few steps behind. Neither of them had spoken.

Upon reaching the ledge, Roxas pulled himself up first, then reached down to assist Olette. It brought him a tiny margin of relief when she took his hand without hesitation.

Now, to begin. It was vital that he opened with something brilliant and appropriately conciliatory.

"Nice weather we're having," Roxas said, and cursed the verbal incontinence that came with being such a goddamn _guy_.

Olette just gave a vague nod, like she hadn't heard him properly, and continued to look distant. She pulled her knees up and tucked them under her face, so that her chin was resting directly on one of the artistically ripped spots on her jeans.

"Do you think she's pretty?"

"What?"

"Candi," Olette said, in that strained, miserable way that was kind of starting to freak him out. "Do you think she's pretty? Prettier than me, maybe?"

"_No_," Roxas ejaculated, about two octaves higher than was probably necessary. He couldn't help it, though, he was seriously spooked. The only time he had ever witnessed Olette's freakish confidence even shaken in the slightest had been when Whatsherface Cotillard had actually won the Academy Award for _La Vie En Rose_.

"I mean," he amended in a slightly less hysterical tone. "She's not completely ugly—if you like dark roots and premature wrinkles—but any iota of attractiveness she might possess kind of evaporates the moment she, you know, opens her mouth."

"Yeah, but still," Olette said, fingering one of her shoelaces distractedly. "Everybody says she has nice eyes. Lots of guys think blue eyes are prettier than green…"

"_I_ like green eyes," Roxas insisted. "A lot."

"Bet you do," Olette said, and it was dumb but Roxas totally gave himself a mental high-five when he saw her lips quirk up. "Hey, Roxas," she went on softly, and Roxas glanced over just in time to catch her sweet sideways look, familiar and loved and so long-awaited. He didn't have to _try_ to fight the urge to make a wisecrack about diabetic comas.

"I'm glad we're talking again," Olette said, smiling with her hair falling half in her face, and in spite of his ardent defense of Rai's honor just awhile back, Roxas couldn't help but think that the guy was really such a mind-bogglingly retarded Neanderthal with no social graces.

"Me too," he replied, and it didn't feel weird at all. Neither of them had apologized outright, which was just fine by him. "Anyway, don't stress yourself over this. Relationships are hard." Now he was aping his erstwhile shrink; he hated himself. "In fact, I'm going through a rough patch with, uh, with Anna myself. We're kind of on a break, actually."

He hadn't yet decided whether he had let more of the truth out the gate than intended, whether he even wanted to go there, when Olette's eyes went wide with empathetic concern. "I—I didn't know. God, I've been so _thoughtless_. Are you alright? Did she _cheat_?"

"No, nothing like that," Roxas said hurriedly. "Philosophically speaking, I'm almost entirely certain that it was mostly my fault—maybe."

Olette seemed to deflate slightly. "I've been such an idiot. It's just—I get so carried away with these things."

"Olette, it's okay—" Roxas began, but was cut short when Olette raised one hand and said, "No, I mean it. You know I care about you, Roxas."

"I know that."

"When you first came to town, I seriously thought to myself, damn, if I didn't have a boyfriend…" she went on, and horror upon horror, appeared to actually be blushing. Surely the end of days could not be far off.

"What's weird is that I felt the exact same way," Roxas said, his ears noticeably burning. "Well, except for the boyfriend part. But then you started shouting at me about beakers and I, uh, reconsidered."

Olette laughed sheepishly. "You know that's just how I show my love. Can't help it that you have such pretty blonde pigtails, Roxas."

"I always knew you were a secret bully," Roxas pronounced, but thought privately, if relentless teasing actually indicated affection, then—

"It's just," Olette continued, the ghost of a frown coming to rest between her brows, under-the-skin tension. "You never say anything, Roxas. You always have this aloof air about you—no, don't deny it, I'm telling you the truth. You've been here for six months and we hardly know anything about you. Example, I know you lived in New York before coming here, but you never talk about that either. So, I worry—"

She paused, and took a deep, shuddering breath, eyes closed.

"I worry that you're not happy," she went on, opening her eyes again. In the summer sunlight, they shone with an almost heartbreaking brightness. "I worry we're not being good enough friends. You always _seem_ happy when you're with me and the guys, but I—I just don't know."

_I'm happy_, Roxas wanted to say. _You guys are everything I've ever wanted, and I'm happy_.

For some reason, the words just wouldn't come, try as he might to push them out.

Olette sighed deeply. "But then things changed, and I thought, hey, maybe he's found something that _is_ good for him. Then I thought, maybe if I tried to help it along, you would be like that, for always. Was I wrong, Roxas?"

"What do you mean?"

"Anna," Olette said, turning to look him in the eyes. "Did she make you happy?"

"Yes," Roxas answered, totally unthinking, and remembered, bone-dry cappuccinos, April fireworks, a dozen blazing summer days and scores of chilling rides around the quiet streets of Amherst, this and that and everything in between, littered at the back of his mind. Happiness, too, was a many-splendored thing, confused and inseparable in component parts. "I think I was happy. Despite everything, I was happy."

Olette grinned, small and sweet, and covered one of his hands with her own. "That's pretty rare, you know? And you said it, relationships are hard. When people find someone that makes them happy, wouldn't they want to keep that person around?"

Roxas hawed loudly, because there was only so much martyrdom he could endure in the name of friendship. "Anyway," he said brightly, "since you currently seem to be without a date, would you mind doing the honor of accompanying me to the Junior Prom tomorrow eve?"

"Are you sure?" Olette asked, almost insultingly incredulous. "I mean, I've seen you glare at those banners like you want to set them on fire and all."

"How'd you know that's not just how I show _my_ affections?" Roxas said tartly.

"Well, alright," Olette said, once more business as usual. "You'll have to double up with Pence, though. He told me he was staging a hunger strike until his parents let him come."

o0o

So, wasn't that just ponies and rainbows and lollipops?

Frankly, Roxas was much too relieved to care. On the downside, he now had the unpleasant task of digging his tux out of its deep catacomb and airing out the scent of mothballs before Saturday night. On the upside, Olette had gotten so excited about their awesome three-person entrance that she hadn't noticed Roxas had been stealing cherries off of her sundae.

Roxas was wondering where he had stashed his old dress shoes when he suddenly noticed how quiet the house was, baked in the warm golden glow of late twilight. He was just getting out of the shower after coming back from playing basketball with Hayner, dragging a towel over his hair. His dad wasn't returning until the next day, and Naminé had been conspicuously absent from the Internet this past week—probably something exam-related. Or perhaps she thought that would get him to call, in which case she clearly had another think coming.

It was quiet, sure, but the good kind of quiet, underlaid with the tiny, creaking whispers of old wood. What a difference little things made sometimes, he thought.

The fact that he had a clearly laid out plan for the evening ahead was just icing on the cake. First, there was ordering pizza—a vast improvement from Krispy Kremes, he felt—and then, he had the last seven chapters of _The Cunning Man_ to keep him company.

Sometimes, Roxas felt he was possibly the most boring seventeen-year-old on Earth.

"At least I have a seriously hot date tomorrow night," he muttered to himself, because apparently, crazy reclusive habits were hard to break out of. "_Two_, even."

By nine thirty, he had entirely forgotten about his loserly lifestyle, and had shifted his attention over to speculating about the feasibility of resurrecting Robertson Davies and _swapping his brain_. He'd dabble in the dark arts just to be able to write like that.

With a soft sigh, he rolled over onto his back on the bed, and flipped to the beginning of the book. Again, his eyes caught the inscription on the flyleaf. _Without you, I shudder to think_.

_Who are you, Addie? And did this book mean as much to you as it now does to me?_

It was probably sort of weird to be so obsessed over a name on the flyleaf of some old book, but that was Roxas to a T anyway—he never gave up once his mind had latched onto some apparent mystery, not until it had got to the absolute bottom of everything. It was his favorite neurosis. Besides, the book _looked_ as if it had been previously owned, kept and read with loving care, though of course it was not outside the realm of possibility that Axel had merely lifted it from a thrift store or—

"No," Roxas moaned, dropping the book onto his face miserably. "No, no, no, no. Don't think about Axel now."

And he'd been doing _so well_. It would be overoptimistic to expect all the loose ends to tie themselves up just like that, but God, he _wanted_ to be overoptimistic, and Axel had been. One great, consummate mystery, altogether. Even more so, in his silence.

Again, Roxas thought of Kerouac. He hadn't really liked _On The Road_, hated its nakedness, the way it wore its outdated beauty on its jacket like an expiration date, a conspicuous lack of immortality. But Axel, with his wild hair and scheming glass-bottle eyes, his sewn-on sneer, was definitely a character out of that book. He would be one of those people Jack Kerouac had been so obsessed with, one of those mad ones, mad to live and mad to talk. Words and movements always unpredictable, but fascinating, a dynamic vitality that was slightly disturbing to be around.

Morosely, he glanced over at his cell phone, docile and maddeningly not ringing on his desk.

Idly, Roxas began pursuing a totally unsubstantiated line of thought involving him tracking down Axel's whereabouts at Amherst College and hunting him like a dog on the street as he had promised to do so long ago. He had had a lot of time to think about this, and though he still had no idea what he would say to Axel if (_when_) he found him, perhaps knowing wasn't the point. Perhaps the words would just come to him, as they had earlier that day.

_I was happy. Despite everything, I was happy. Please come back. _

But the problem with optimism was that it just didn't hold up in the face of the cold, hard truth, and as Roxas pondered this fact, he was suddenly consumed with the urge to throw something. He stared at his hand instead, thin and full of angles under the overhead light, and thought, a bit desperately, that this wasn't just going to go away. No, when friends made—and he had been trying to push this thought to the back of his mind for the past two weeks—sudden romantic overtures, things _changed_, and they wouldn't just go back to the way they used to be just because you didn't want to talk about it.

This did not necessarily mean that everything would go to shit like it had in New York, but he was very much aware of how the situation stood. Slowly, he brought his fingers down to his lips. What had it been like, the surprising warmth, the bittersweet of clove cigarettes…

"_DON'T WORRY, DO YOUR BEST_…"

Roxas fell off the bed.

He got up immediately and dove for his phone, nearly colliding bodily into the side of his desk. His heart was leaping to the point of inducing nausea. Without a tremor's pause, he grabbed the device and flipped it open, scanning the message quickly.

The next moment, he was hopping into his trainers and rushing out of the house, post-haste.

o0o

Axel was waiting for him on the corner of East Street, which was the closest to the house Roxas had ever allowed. He stood reclining against a lamppost, bathed in a sodium vapor glow, his green scooter parked serenely on the side of the street. When he saw Roxas, he stood up straight, raised two fingers to his temple, and said, "Yo."

Roxas blinked. Then he stepped forward, took Axel by the shoulder, and shoved him roughly back into the lamppost.

"What the blazes gives?" Axel shouted, struggling to retain balance and not fall down embarrassingly in a pile of long limbs. "Seriously, you've got to stop hitting me. At least you didn't beat my head this time, I need that to graduate—"

"Are you fucking demented?" Roxas screamed back, savage, almost deranged. He could sense the bloodlust rising. "What gives? That's all you've got to say, _what gives_?"

"Is that any reason to _assault_ a person?"

"Oh cry me a river," Roxas riposted, fighting not to reach maliciously for Axel's neck. "What the hell have you been up to for the last two weeks?"

And the answer he received was, "Finals."

"_What_?"

"I was doing finals," Axel said, sniffing disdainfully as he rubbed at his shoulder in a show of melodramatic discomfort. He even winced once or twice for good measure. "Well, I was doing finals this week, and studying for them the week before."

"Since when do you study?" Roxas boggled, fearing for the very fabric of reality. "Do you even own a textbook?"

"I am perfectly capable of borrowing from my hallmates, thank you very much," Axel drawled, apparently quite pleased with himself. "And for your information, studying at the last minute is necessary when one hasn't felt the need to attend a single lecture all semester." Under his breath, he added, "Couldn't cheat my way out of _everything_."

"Somehow, I doubt that," Roxas deadpanned, and thought, casual brutality and petty bickering, this was going along just swimmingly. "I doubt your hallmates will ever see those books you 'borrowed' again either."

"I see you're just as big a sourpuss as always," Axel could be heard muttering, in what he clearly imagined was a discreet whisper. He reached up with one hand and brushed his hair back distractedly, which was the precise moment Roxas noticed that the sunset-red mass was not hanging all out in its usual mad disarray, but slicked back—with what, _cement glue_?—and tied loosely into a mid-height ponytail at the back of Axel's head.

In fact, that was not the only thing different about his appearance.

From the top down, it seemed as though a fashion cyclone had attacked Axel and left him a changed man in its wake of devastation. He was, for one thing, wearing a nice, off-pink, _perfectly sensible_ Oxford shirt, with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows and two buttons undone at the top, exposing the strong, clean lines of his throat and the barest glimpse of sharp collarbones. The long hem of the shirt fell over a pair of tan _khakis_ slacks which actually seemed to fit—both shirt and slacks were for the most part unsoiled, and appeared to have at least seen an iron press at some point in their lifetime. And the shoes…

The shoes were not green and beat up and squiggled all over with hieroglyphics, but were instead brown and nondescript and made of leather. In the light of the street lamp, they shone unassumingly. Evidently, the zombie apocalypse was near.

Roxas couldn't help it. He had grown, no, had _conditioned _himself to be able to stand in Axel's presence and not rip his clothing off in abject horror—a good thing, as that kind of behavior would probably have been taken in all kinds of wrong way, in retrospect. But the point was that, over the months, he had built up resistance to Axel's taste in fashion, controversial at best and outright stomach-turning at worst as it was. Thus, in the face of this new still larger than life but incredibly PC-fied image, he did the only thing for which he had strength left in his soul.

He gaped.

Lapping up the attention, Axel leered, preening smugly. He blew softly on his fingernails, prima donna style. "Like what you see?"

"What happened to you?" Roxas asked plaintively. "Did you run out of clean clothes? Wait, but that wouldn't bother you, so…"

This was clearly not the reaction Axel had been hoping for. "I decided to go for a change of image," he said, sounding rather put out and almost shirty as a result.

"But—_why_?" Roxas boggled aloud, feeling more and more lost as the conversation went on.

"No reason, just felt like it," Axel said with an elaborate shrug.

Not for the first time in their acquaintance—though for a distinctly different reason than usual—Roxas was struck dumb by the strangeness of the universe. He tried to recover by changing the topic, but in his state of reduced brain activity, was led to saying, "I've been trying to call you for days. I thought you were still mad about what happened at the mall."

He kicked himself mentally the moment the words left his mouth, and again when he saw the line of Axel's (off-pink) shoulders stiffen visibly. His insides felt sloshed about for a whole host of unspeakably humiliating reasons. Of course he had to go there.

"I wasn't mad," Axel said quietly, seeming to find a spot of unspecified shadow somehow immensely interesting. "Thought _you_ were mad, actually."

"What'd make you think that?" Roxas asked, and noted that his voice had gone all squeaky again. Must be some kind of tragic hormonal disorder, he should get that looked at.

Axel raised his eyebrow, and Roxas had to resist very hard the urge to check if said brow had been trimmed recently.

"Well, let's just say you didn't seem to take too well to—what I did that day."

A few awkward segues passed in which neither of them breathed nor made eye contact with any part of the other's body.

Roxas coughed. "It wasn't bad."

Axel's eyebrow climbed to truly deplorable height.

"What I mean is, I wasn't angry," Roxas amended quickly, feeling his face burn in deep wretchedness. "You just—you surprised me, that's all."

"Really?" questioned Axel. "Is that all?"

"Well, yeah," said Roxas, staring down at the pavement beneath his feet. "You could have given me some clue—some sort of warning sign beforehand. I had no idea."

"You had no idea," Axel repeated blandly. "Are you shitting me?"

Roxas looked up angrily. "What is that supposed to mean?"

"How could you not have any idea? How wasn't it blindingly obvious?"

"Well it _wasn't_."

"I gave you my dead mother's book!"

"And what is that—marriage proposal in Canadese?" Roxas shot back, but filed away the latest bit of information. So that was that, the identity of the mysterious Addie. Then, D.B. must be…

Axel did that thing where he shoved his hands into his pockets and kind of shifted uncomfortably on his feet, and the motion brought Roxas up short. All of sudden, he realized exactly what he had said, what _they_ both had been saying. This was it, then, the moment when it all came out in the open. They were really going to do this. He'd be lying if he said that, deep down inside, some part of him hadn't been painfully holding its breath for this.

"Look, I think this has gone far enough," Axel said, sounding strangely subdued. His eyes were still fixed upon that unknown spot just outside the frame. "I got upset when your friends came around, so I kissed you to mess with your head. It was just a stupid joke. If it means that much to you, I'm sorry. It won't happen again."

For some reason that for a long time would not become clear to him, Roxas could swear that, at that particular moment, he could hear something shatter very loudly in the distance.

Axel tried to make some faintly frustrated motion, then stopped midway, dropping his hands to his sides. All was silent, all was still, and Roxas couldn't think. There was something here he was missing, he was sure of it. He tried to read into Axel's expression, which was the usual poker face in the dim light, only misted over with odd gradations of tension. The thought suddenly occurred to Roxas: _he's lying_.

But for the life of him he couldn't think of one single reason why Axel would want to lie about this, not one single justification, so perhaps there were no gradations at all. Perhaps he just wanted to believe that, though that did not make much sense either.

And then, Roxas thought, why did it matter? This was exactly the opening he had been hoping for. If he took it now, the last two weeks would go away, and everything would go back to the way it had been. All that sturm und drang he had gone through, those ulcers he had nearly developed, all those silent hours spent pushing speed dial three, they didn't have to mean anything at all. It was even more perfect than he could dare to imagine.

Perfect.

"It's okay," Roxas said, swallowing around the ball somehow lodged in his throat. "Let's just forget about it."

Axel's jaws held tight, all angles, no curves, but for a moment only and then he was quirking up his lips, trademark cocky grin firmly in place. Normal. Perfect. "Guess that's that, then," he said lightly, waving his hand in a very c'est la vie motion.

Then he turned and walked briskly towards his scooter. Roxas thought fleetingly that he was just going to drive off, but at the very last possible moment, Axel turned and asked over his shoulder, "Tell me, Roxas, have you ever been to a college party?"

o0o

"When you said 'college party', this was admittedly not what I had in mind," Roxas said conversationally, dismounting from the backseat of Rosalina and making to remove his helmet. Around him, all was dark and eerily quiet.

Axel laughed and shook his head. "Nah, this is my dorm room. Got to pick up some stuff, d'you mind?"

"Not at all." In fact, he was rather excited about the prospect. It was like stepping into the den of the tiger, or, more appropriately, uncovering another missing piece of the puzzle. He hadn't given up on that Axel/great mystery analogy, and this was his reward.

Axel lived in one of those one-story building blocks they had littered around the Amherst campus, grey concrete and little windows, incredibly depressing in the daylight. At night, the purplish fluorescent lights that lit the hallways inside didn't help matters.

Roxas followed Axel as he strode purposefully down the corridor. He stopped at the very last door on the left, and pushed it open—the catch had been held down with duct tape—waving vaguely at the surrounding, "This is it. La Casa. What'd you think?"

"It's very," Roxas fished around for a word, "_neat_."

Axel chuckled. "Well, this is just the common room, and my roommate's kind of OCD about cleaning. My room's much more suitably disorganized. Have a seat, I'll be right out."

He indicated the futon, which appeared to be the centerpiece in the small but brightly lit and seriously very organized room, before disappearing behind one of the two doorways leading off from the common space. It was, predictably, the one that was crisscrossed all over with what looked like yellow police tapes stolen from actual crime scenes.

Bewilderedly, Roxas made himself sit down on the futon. As his eyes wandered around the room, he was suddenly taken with the thought that Axel had not even cracked a joke about Roxas joining him in his bedroom. He frowned slightly. How uncharacteristic.

He was still pondering this when the second door swung open, and a young man of medium height came out, swinging the strap of a black computer case around his shoulder. He had a pale, attractive face that at first glance didn't evince any strong characters, an impression bound to change with a closer look at his dark, deep-set eyes. The most memorable feature about the man, however, was his hair, which fell haphazardly over half of his face and was a most peculiar shade of silvery _blue_ in the light.

Their eyes caught across the room. "Hello," the young man said, not seeming at all surprised by the sight of a complete stranger sitting in his dorm.

Roxas, not quite as gifted in matters of social etiquette, bolted up from his seat and began stammering like a total idiot, "Um, hi. I'm here with Axel—I'm Axel's friend. You must be his OCD roommate." He winced mentally, then fidgeted in awkward silence a little before holding out a hand falteringly. "Sorry. My name's Roxas."

The man shook his hand calmly, showing no sign of having been offended by Roxas's faux pas. "Zexion," he said politely. "I haven't seen you around campus, Roxas. Are you a freshman?"

"Um, no," Roxas said, finding himself coloring for no real reason. "Actually, I'm still in high school."

Zexion just nodded coolly in reply. There was some sort of determinedly nonjudgmental quality in his handsome face that made all his expressions very difficult to read. His quiet air gave off even a stronger sense of mystery than Axel's hyperactive lunacy.

The conversation was in serious danger of straggling on the vine—Roxas couldn't think of anything to say that wouldn't sound ridiculous, and Zexion didn't seem enthusiastic to take over the lead—when Axel came bouncing out of his room, buttoning up a fresh long-sleeved shirt. This shirt was even nicer than the previous one, form-fitting, sleek black material with some kind of iridescent undertone that made his eyes almost supernaturally green, jungle-dark and dangerous.

This, Roxas decided, was kind of a dumb thought to entertain, given the situation.

"Zexion," Axel said brightly, in the distinctly saccharine tone he used whenever mischief was afoot. "Didn't know you were in. I see you've met Roxas. Even he thinks you'll make someone a very good wife someday."

"Axel," Zexion returned evenly. "If I could have a word. I respect your decision to upgrade your wardrobe, but please do not take that as permission to freely use my shoes. Especially shoes that you've taken the liberty of removing from my closet without my knowledge."

"Come on," Axel laughed, eyes glinting. "What's a little sharing between friends?"

Zexion shrugged. "Sharing is fine. I just didn't think you'd be so willing to advertise the fact that you share shoe size with someone you so often ridicule for his inferior height." He paused, and added with significant, eviscerating intent, "Or perhaps you no longer believe shoe sizes are… _indicative_."

Roxas had to bite the insides of his mouth to prevent himself from bursting out laughing, while Axel scowled darkly and choked/fumed/spluttered or some variation thereof at the repartee. Zexion did not seem to pay him any attention. "It was nice meeting you, Roxas," he said, and headed for the doorway.

"Aren't you coming to Demyx's party?" Axel called out after him. "You know he'll be ever so heartbroken if you don't."

"I have simulations to run," Zexion said over his shoulder, and closed the door soundly behind him.

"Did he say he had to run simulations?" Roxas asked in mild confusion.

Axel sniggered to himself. "Yeah, Zexy's a nerd like that," he said, and Roxas made a note to never, ever divulge the details of how he had been spending _his_ Friday night right before Axel had waltzed back into his life.

He looked up to the peculiar sight of Axel spraying some sort of misty liquid onto his chest. What was this fresh madness?

"What are you doing?"

"Applying cologne," Axel said simply. "You know, scented water, used by some men."

"Men who aren't _you_."

"Sure, I do," Axel argued. "This is—Lacoste Essential, the new fragrance for men," he said, reading aloud from the letterings on the bottle. He was evidently seeing the name for the first time in his life.

"Really?" Roxas asked facetiously. "Is it any good?"

"Who knows, I just bought it," Axel shrugged. "Ready to go?"

"You're the one who had to go off to complete his grooming ritual," Roxas said tartly.

"You know, Roxas," Axel said with an air of infinite wisdom, slinging an arm around Roxas's shoulder. "Your problem is that you're much too critical of others, and as a result, you're not open to new experiences. You're just like that character from _Anna Karenina_, what's his name. Levin! You're just like Konstantin Levin."

Roxas couldn't help raising an eyebrow. Plus, Lacoste Essential kind of made his nose itch. "Don't tell me you actually read Tolstoy."

"Of course not," Axel said flatly. "I got it off CliffsNotes."

- - -

**TBC**

* * *

**A few words on pairings: **

Well, I don't usually do this, but the time has come for me to address the situation some of you have brought up in comments, which is the suspicious lack of secondary pairings in this fic. Now, clearly some secondary pairings do exist, and are clearly labeled as such, but I understand that by pairings you guys actually mean _yaoi_ pairings. That's fine and good. We all love yaoi here, don't we? This is just to clear up possible confusions.

One thing you must understand is that, just because I don't include a certain pairing does not necessarily mean I hate it. Similarly, the mere inclusion of a pairing doesn't actually indicate any love on my part. In fact, if you take a quick glance the stories I have archived, you will notice that I am rather pairing-promiscuous, though I prefer to focus on one pairing per story. Aside from Axel/Roxas, I am perfectly aware of the KH Holy Trinity of Leon/Cloud, Riku/Sora, and Zemyx. At this point, my intentions for _My Girlfriend, Who Lives In Canada_ are fairly clear; you will see in due time. As to general opinions, I will say that:

- I am pretty ambivalent about Riku/Sora. Yes or no doesn't matter to me, so you can read into my writing as much as you'd like. Of course, leaning towards yes is slightly encouraged :D Hey, Kairi had her chance…

- Leon/Cloud doesn't tempt me, but they won't show up here anyway. If I can't incorporate Disney characters, I will have to exclude FF characters as well – I'm equal opportunity like that. I can recommend goodfic for the pairing, though. /ETA: **Mel** pointed out that Seifer's gang are themselves FF characters – oops, you totally caught me there. My only excuse is that they appear in KH as ghettofabs teenagers bearing little semblance to their FFVIII counterparts, so it's okay, lol. Perhaps I will make an oblique reference to Disney later on to balance things out.

- As you may have picked up from this chapter, I rather like Zemyx. I don't care that it's over-popular – I ship _Axel/Roxas_. This, however, hasn't stopped me from writing Xigbar/Demyx as well, and I suspect I will again in the future. I even like Demyx/Naminé.

In the end, it all comes down to the fact that it's 8 chapters into the story and the main guys aren't even anywhere with each other yet, so let's just focus on the fact that I love Axel/Roxas, you love Axel/Roxas, and the haters can deal ;)

* * *

_Next chapter:_ Roxas meets some fascinating new people. They all seem to already know all about him. What's going on?


	9. Chapter IX

**Title:** My Girlfriend, Who Lives In Canada

**Pairings:** Axel/Roxas, Olette/Rai, SoRiKai, and Zemyx (yes, officially)

**Disclaimer:** The Kingdom Hearts franchise and its characters do not belong to me.

**Summary:** You should know this already, but it's the one with the made-up girlfriend.

**A/N:** I'm very, very sorry. For the six people who're still reading this, you are all wonderful but oh my god, _what is wrong with you?_

* * *

**IX.**

The first time Roxas had laid eyes on Amherst, it had been early December, the new snow barely on the ground and not yet tinged that hard yellow typically found in the dead of winter. The drive into town had been nothing but dark woods and rolling farmland, grave-silent, undeniably depressing at dusk. The sight of the tree-lined streets by the town common, all frosted over and emptied of life, had basically convinced Roxas on the spot that his new home was kind of lacking in the grandeur of the collegiate lifestyle. You know, for a college town.

Over six months following that initial assessment, the elusive college scene was about to hustle its way into his life, though admittedly not in any manner he might have feasibly anticipated.

"Terrific," Axel muttered, killing Rosalina's engine as they pulled up to a two-storied townhouse several blocks from central campus. "He's having one of those crap ethnic-themed parties again. I can never figure out how to fix my drinks." He slanted an uncertain look over at Roxas. "You okay with that?"

Roxas blinked, and then nodded dumbly, because, _hello_, code-speak much?

His dulling powers of deduction suggested that Axel's apparent dismay must have something to do with the jangling music emanating from within the house, loud enough to be clearly heard on the sidewalk, though perhaps still on this side of noise pollution. Some variety of instrumental slash lounge slash chill-out slash… something, though with a twanging, exotic quality he knew was distinctly foreign but couldn't place. It made him see in colors, a bright, merging pastiche of red and gold and mystic blue.

"Come on," Axel said, half-leading half-dragging Roxas by his trapped wrist, and then they were weaving their way through the crowd at the entrance, which parted easily enough. The interior of the house was awash in satiny blue light. The music rose up to fill Roxas's ears; the air smelled vaguely herbal, like he'd stepped into some balmy, tropical dimension.

Mesmerized by his surroundings, Roxas only dimly registered that Axel had let go of him and was currently assaulting people right and left. "Where's Demyx?" he said, half-shouting just to be heard over the music, but seemed to be having problems getting his audience's attention, all of whom appeared to be more interested in leaning against various vertical surfaces and maintaining an uniformly placid, glaze-eyed appearance.

Suddenly, Roxas realized that the Parting of the Red Sea effect from earlier must have been chemically manufactured.

"Stop harassing people already, I could see you pulling up from the second floor."

Axel spun around, and Roxas automatically followed his gaze, to see a head of carefully-disheveled blonde hair bobbing through the swaying crowd at the foot of the stairs. In an impressive minute, the person had cleared the course and rushed Axel through the doorway closest to the stairway. Roxas followed them and found himself in a large room—still crowded, but it was airier, less in your face. Not much furniture, but he saw throw-pillows everywhere, embroidered and expensive-looking.

"Dude, harshing the mellow!" Disheveled Blonde Hair was hissing, even as Axel laughed and brushed off his death grip.

"Nice to see you too, Demyx. If you can stop spazzing for two seconds, I'd like to make an introduction…"

Roxas blinked and assessed Demyx's appearance—white button-down, stonewashed jeans, a patterned silk scarf knotted at the waist for a belt. Aside from the hair gel commercial vibes, he looked weirdly normal, red plastic cup in one hand and an annoyed expression directed fully at Axel. What had he expected?

Axel swept an arm over Roxas's shoulder and reeled him in with a shit-eating grin. As if from a great distant, Roxas heard his name, the syllables parsing at the running rate of molasses in deep winter.

"I think I may have contracted a high from your party fumes," Roxas found himself saying strangely, probably driven _insane_ by said party fumes, or possibly just continuing the theme of verbal incontinence he had going tonight.

Predictably, Axel did not react to this statement at all, but Demyx's friendly smile seemed to derail a little. He valiantly recovered, and thrust out his free hand to take Roxas's in an enthusiastic grasp. "It's great to finally meet you, Roxas. I guess you already know my name, and yeah, now you mention it, the Masala _is_ a bit thick down here, maybe if we go outside--"

"Why're you even throwing one of these parties again?" Axel cut in. "Didn't learn your lesson after your living room caught on fire last time? Speaking of which, do you have the hookahs set up…"

"Upstairs," Demyx answered sullenly, his friendly demeanor mysteriously vanished. "And no, you will not 'doctor the mix to make things more interesting', Axel, I swear to God…"

"Whatever. I still think you only took up India Studies for an excuse to get blown anyway…"

"_South Asian_ Studies!" Demyx snapped. "Because you're in such a position to trivialize other people's work, with your book and mind-reading mumbo-jumbo…"

"Psychology?" Roxas interrupted, unable to help himself. "_Seriously_?" he boggled, raising an eyebrow at Axel, who looked away pointedly.

"Kind of fitting if you think about it," Demyx commented, rolling his eyes in an extremely well-practiced way. "I mean, besides the _slack off _factor, what better way to improve the arsenal he regularly uses to ruin other people's lives?"

"Yeah, because anyone sane would prefer trekking through the tropical wilderness two summers in a row courting dysentery and malaria," Axel said. "Now that's an academic discipline for the _sane_."

"Teaching music to underprivileged kids in New Delhi is hardly braving the wilderness," Demyx sniffed. "There's this new thing, Axel, and it's called contributing to society, not that I'd expect it from you."

Roxas couldn't be sure, but something told him this whole situation was about to go all the way to eleven on the discomfort scale. Then he realized he was feeling this because someone was treading on his foot, and scooted back just in time to see sliding into view a pair of what looked remarkably like the pointy black kitten heels Olette had once spent an entire Sunday gushing over in a store window. In the dim light, they _gleamed_, like a weapon.

"But we all know the real reason behind your passage to India has little to do with humanitarian relief, don't we, Dem?"

o0o

The young woman who had slithered into the space vacated by Roxas had shoulder-length platinum hair, slicked back along the smooth contour of her head. She was on the small side, but somehow managed to fill out her gray pencil-skirt suit nicely on top of sporting a rather impressive décolletage. In her, Roxas recognized the high-power, sharkish look of a seasoned stockbroker. Except in a young, sexy way.

Something very odd was going on. The party was still in full swing, but it was as if a bubble had formed all around them, buffering all the noise. Axel's face grew stony, and he shot an accusing glare at Demyx, who shrugged helplessly. The weird thing, Roxas noted, was that the girl appeared well-aware of this display of pantomime, and yet was unbothered by it all—indeed, she seemed noticeably pleased.

"Come now, don't get all awkward on my account," she said, snatching the cup Demyx was holding and draining it in one quick swallow, flashing her long white throat. "By all means, keep yapping about your pathetic little lives. You know there's nothing there that would interest me."

Axel's expression smoothed over into its usual lazy sneer—signaling that he smelled a challenge. "Larxene," he greeted, in a drippy but cool voice. "What are you doing here without your butch lesbian girlfriend? Why aren't you busy curling each other's hair and painting your toenails like you always do on a Friday night?"

It occurred to Roxas perhaps Axel couldn't hear himself when he talked. He had never considered this possibility before; his mental health would be in a much better place if he started to weigh in the existence of this obvious character flaw.

"What would you know about my Friday night?" Larxene said, smirking. "To answer your question, he's probably still wining and dining with the rest of the fags over at the graduating seniors' tent party. I just barely escaped, hence the suit. You could go take my place, if you'd like. At this point in the evening, I'm sure none of them would notice."

Axel's mouth twitched, almost imperceptibly. "You shouldn't sell yourself short, Larx. I couldn't possibly carry off gold-digger chic with the same flair that you do." He emphasized the word 'flair' with a disturbing gesture that involved holding both hands up to his chest and waggling his eyebrows, a sight that made Roxas fear death by transferred mortification.

"You're cute when you pretend to know things," Larxene said, patting Axel's cheek, "but I've grown too old to blush." From a purely objective standpoint, Roxas decided he didn't like her—this Larxene was clearly the no good, handsy type, and the gratuitous de Sade quote wasn't going to win her any points either.

"Marluxia is well aware I'm only using him for his family's money," Larxene went on. She seemed far more pleased with herself than could reasonably be expected from that statement.

Axel smirked. "And that thing with your Chem professor, the creepy East European guy—that's just for…"

"Professor Vexen is purely for my carnal needs," she said loftily.

Beside them, Demyx made a pained expression. "I will pay you," he said dolefully, "_any_ amount of money never to say that in my presence ever again."

This was probably an error of judgment on his part, as both Axel and Larxene paused for a moment before breaking into identical grins—entirely uncoordinated, which was the scariest part—and rounding on Demyx with matching gleams of evil delight. Their shoulders were touching, and it was kind of horrifying given the animosity flying around in the air just a minute ago.

"Back to the issue at hand," Larxene said, a smirk curving over the edge of her pilfered cup. "So. You've been jilted."

"What?" Demyx squawked. "No! _What?_"

"You followed a man halfway around the world, and he wouldn't even deign to attend one of your pathetic tea parties," Larxene supplied matter-of-factly. "What else would you call that?"

Demyx muttered something that sounded like, "It's so not like that," but no one could be sure because Axel decided to chime in with, "Yeah, you know, I did ask him, but what a shocker, he claimed he was too busy." He shook his head in a show of disapproval. "The nerves, right?"

"Of course he's busy!" Demyx snapped. "He has simulations to run." Even Roxas had to blink at that. "His research's coming up for review this week, and if you recall, there was that little setback when _months worth_ of research notes got vaporized because a certain _someone_ thought it would be hilarious to start a campus bonfire right in the middle of midterms."

If possible, the look on Axel's face just got _meaner_. "Aren't you the supportive girlfriend?" he crooned. Perhaps this was revenge for the psychology jab, or perhaps it was pure jackassery, Roxas couldn't tell.

Demyx, clearly beleaguered at this point, looked as though he desperately wanted to close his eyes and count to ten, or possibly drop down into full lotus position and start an '_om_' mantra right then and there.

"To be fair," Larxene said, in a tone that made it clear she harbored no such intention. "Zexion apparently sat through that five-hour concert last semester. You know, the one with the head of the South Asian Studies department banging on drums while Demyx pretended to play the sitar? It's an inhuman feat. I think it's the conclusive proof that he's a robot."

"_I_ think it proves your tin ears can't appreciate Indian music," Demyx countered. "I knew I shouldn't have bothered sending you both tickets, since neither of you can be prevailed upon to do anything unless it involves drinking my booze. And seriously, why the hell am I the one getting grilled here? Axel brought a plus one, for God's sake!"

Roxas hadn't known Demyx all that long, all things considered, but he decided that the guy was going to die, slowly and painfully and not soon enough. From the way Axel was eyeballing him, it seemed the very same idea had occurred to him.

"You don't say," Larxene said, raising a penciled brow. She seemed to be noticing Roxas's presence for the first time, but that didn't make him feel any more reassured. Quite the contrary, since the very next words out of her mouth were, "So this must be Roxas. You've been selling him short, Axel. Really, he's not how I imagined him at all. Less J Crew, more Abercrombie."

"_Excuse me?_"

"Roxas, this is Larxene," Axel said irritably, and lurched forward like he wanted to act as Roxas's human shield, very nice, like hiding him from view would do any good _now_. "She enjoys French poetry, long walks on the beach, and tasering hobos in school parking lots."

Larxene's laugh was just like her voice, high and arch and immiscibly sinister. "Are you still holding a grudge about that? If it dresses like it lives in boxcar… but oh no, that's no longer the case, is it, Axel? Just look at you now," she remarked, flicking him a gaze that slithered from head to toe. "You look _awful_. Really, I know you were depressed or whatever, but that's no reason to let Banana Republic vomit all over you like that."

Before Roxas could ask Larxene about the medical condition that forced her to communicate strictly in clothing labels, Axel had scowled and ground out, "I was _never_ depressed."

Demyx snorted loudly. "_Please_," he said. "If you'd seen him during that first week, you'd be calling this a massive _improvement_. I've never heard of anyone accidentally poisoning themselves on nicotine patches."

"Do me a solid and pop a Xanax before you give yourself an embolism," Axel said, rolling his eyes in a way that can only be described as—defensive? "So I went to UMass for a few days, did a few Jägerbombs off some frat guy's abs—don't you think the _intervention_ was a bit over the top?"

"You did _what_?" Roxas interrupted, before he could stop himself.

"Nothing," Axel said quickly, averting his gaze to somewhere beyond Demyx's elbow.

Larxene laughed. Alarmingly, she had somehow managed to get behind Roxas and drape herself all over his shoulders while he hadn't been paying attention. _Handsy_. "Face it, possum," she said, basically breathing into his ear, "your man isn't much for boyfriend material."

"Uh," Roxas replied. He might be having a stroke, he couldn't be sure.

"Maybe you should consider switching to Demyx here instead," Larxene suggested, possible leering. "Much better prospects. Did you know his parents own something like a third of Morocco?"

"If that were actually the case, I doubt you'd be pimping me out so casually," Demyx muttered. He didn't sound quite as unhappy about this as his expression would indicate.

"This is true," Larxene said, and blew Demyx a kiss. "Still, on a scale of loser to bankable, he's got Red over there beat, hands down. You wouldn't have to worry about STD screenings _nearly_ as frequently, for one thing."

Axel's face was still stony and unmoved—which was really the problem.

"Can we not do this?" Demyx moaned, and Roxas saw in his crumpled face a bleak, naked sort of despair that read clearly as, _I really don't want my living room set on fire again, seriously._

That wasn't a totally unfounded fear, Roxas thought, pulling himself to full height. "In order to know virtue, we must first acquaint ourselves with vice," he said, and felt ten kinds of deranged, but oh well.

His answer garnered confused stares from Axel and Demyx, but Larxene went quiet. She disentangled herself from Roxas—he tried not to shiver in relief, but it was hard—and gave him a flaying look.

But instead of calling him a tool like he probably deserved, she just said, "Interesting possum," and walked over to a table in a corner, where Roxas saw numerous bottles of assorted alcohol laid out next to a stack of cups. He felt a nudge, and turned back to see Axel giving him a look. _What was that all about?_

"A display of bad taste," he said, hoping fervently Larxene wouldn't be able hear from where she was standing. Because he was dumb.

"Speaking of bad taste, Axel," Larxene said, right on cue, and spun around with a new drink in hand. "Guess which venerable alum I saw trying to recruit for his spiffy new firm over at the tent party." She cocked her head in challenge, smiling. "Go on, you'd never guess."

"Who?" Axel asked. His tone was still noticeably testy.

Her smile deepened. "_Saix_."

It had to be some kind of army trigger word, because Demyx immediately said, "Oh _God_," and buried his face in his hand, at the same time that Axel exploded, "_No fucking way!_" and jumped out of his surly slouch like a hunting dog coming to point. His grin was manic, his body practically vibrating, waves of excitement rolling off like palpable heat, and Roxas had no idea what the fuck was going on but he had a notion this could be going nowhere good.

This was confirmed when Axel clapped him on the shoulders and said in a rush, "Roxas, you mind just sticking around for a bit? I'll be right back but shit, I just need half an hour—no, twenty minutes, I gotta to gather some rope, a staple gun, and maybe some hickory smoke powder, yeah, like a barrel of smoke powder. FUCK. This is gonna be so fucking awesome, okay I gotta go. Stay there. Be right back."

He was off like a shot.

"You know," Larxene mused, "I think I better come along too. I have a feeling this could be a good show."

Still smiling, she pressed the cup she was holding into Roxas's hand, and gave him a wink. "Why don't you enjoy yourself a little until Red gets back? I'm sure they don't serve liquor at juice time in kindergarten."

Roxas narrowed his eyes. "Thanks, but I don't drink."

Larxene chuckled. "Aw, you think I poisoned it or something?" She lifted the cup from his fingers daintily, and took a quick but obviously swallow. "Satisfied? Now don't be ridiculous, this is my special secret recipe. You won't be sorry."

o0o

"What the hell is going on?" Roxas asked.

"Nothing you want to get mixed up in," Demyx said, shaking his head. They were sitting on the porch at the front of his house, with the sounds of the party playing in the background. Every now and then people would stumble drunkenly past them into the darkness beyond, but for the most part, they were left alone, and the Masala was much less intoxicating out here in the open air.

"This is like sophomore year all over again," Demyx went on. "God, I hope they don't expect me to post bond for them again. I really should stop inviting them to my parties. I should consider getting new friends."

He was clearly going through a crisis. "Okay," Roxas said in a soothing voice, wondering if he should take this opportunity to make a break for it.

Demyx clawed a hand over his face, like he wanted to wipe this entire night away. Then he turned over with a tired smile, and said, "Ah, fuck it. Let the proper authority handle things for once. By the way, in the unlikely event you haven't already figured it out, right now I'm supposed to drill you for information that Larxene would probably and immediately use to ruin your life."

Roxas blinked. "Yeah, I think I'd prefer if that didn't happen."

"Me too," Demyx said. "I'm thinking we sit out here for some reasonable amount of time, and then you duck around the back and make a run for it before either of them comes back. Say, do you need a ride?"

"Not really," Roxas said, glancing down at his watch. 12:15 am. It was Saturday already. In approximately twenty hours, he'd be putting on his wrinkled tuxedo and accompanying Olette to the Junior Prom, in a life that at this moment felt like something in a whole other galaxy: inconceivably far away, surreal.

"Actually," he continued, playing with the red plastic cup in his hand, "I think I'll stick around and wait. He said he'd be back."

Demyx gave him a vaguely pitying look. "Um, sure. If you want." He sighed, and added, "Hey, I'm sure he didn't mean to abandon you like that. I don't know why I'm even defending him, but this thing with Saix is apparently, like, the culmination of a lifelong feud or something. Supposed to be _epic_. So, in conclusion, he's a jerk, but at least this time there's some sort of justification."

Roxas raised an eyebrow. "Just to be clear, we are talking about _Axel_, right?"

Demyx sniggered. "Good point."

"Seriously, is he really Canadian? I've met bulldozers with more tact. He wouldn't know political correctness if it skated up to him with a hockey stick wearing Ben Mulroney's comb-over."

"Canadian Idol?" Demyx asked, staring at him weirdly. "_Really?_"

Roxas gave him a leveling look. "Takes one," he said.

"Hey, don't look at me like that, I got my info from Perez Hilton. I don't watch cheesy reality television shows, and certainly not their cheap knockoffs"

"Right." He totally asked for it. "Did you really follow Zexion to India?"

Demyx's smile wobbled. "No!" he protested. "Well, a little…"

Roxas raised his eyebrow—but not exactly in a mean way. "How do you follow someone a little?"

"Only in the sense that he was the one who first told me about the project, okay? I mean, it's not like we lived together. Or were even residing in the same city for most of the summer. Or came back on the same flight."

"Did you want to?"

Demyx shifted his weight back onto his arms, pillared behind him on the floorboard. "It's not that simple. He has this whole other thing he's involved in, with this startup IT firm in Bangalore. It's a lot of work in these early stages, they were practically living in the office when I came down for visits. It was insane." He paused. "Am I oversharing? I'm oversharing, aren't I? You think I'm a weirdo, don't you?"

"A little," he admitted, and they both laughed. It was not awkward, which frankly surprised Roxas. What was this new socially competent thing all about?

"Hey, it's not like I'm some kind of pathetic satellite that has no life outside of my boyfriend or anything," Demyx amended, and Roxas felt abruptly sobered, for no reason at all. "I actually had a blast in New Delhi. Hold on, I got a picture of me and the kids from the center, let me get it for you."

He fumbled with his wallet, and produced a small photograph, which showed Demyx sitting in the center of a gaggle of children, all smiling ear to ear. They were posing on the flatbed of a truck, and the Demyx in the picture, t-shirt clad, dusty-faced, looked a noticeable half a dozen pounds lighter than the version sitting next to Roxas. He thought of India, of the Taj Mahal, things only seen in postcards. Distances.

"This was my second summer. The year before I was doing this boot camp language program in Calcutta, that wasn't nearly as fun. I barely got any exposure to, like, India, which seems to defeat the entire purpose of being there, if you know what I mean. That's what Zexion said, anyway. Did you know he grew up in India? His dad works for Citibank or something—hey, wait, how come you know Zexion anyway?"

Not a satellite, _right_. Roxas hid a smile. "I met him over at Axel's dorm, right before coming over here. He… really loves those simulations, apparently."

"Hey, come on, it's not like that. He's on a deadline. Seriously, his schedule wouldn't be half this jammed if Axel hadn't burned half his research notes back in March."

"Yeah, I remember hearing something about that." What he actually remembered was a deranged crimson hedgehog demanding an espresso spritzer darker than Satan's soul, muttering incoherently about burning documents for three days straight. It figured that things would all circle back to this.

"If you don't mind me asking," Roxas began, staring at the content of his cup for the first time. Larxene's secret recipe made for a neon blue drink, apparently. "Why are you friends with Axel? You don't seem to like him much."

"I ask myself this same question," Demyx said soberly. "Actually, we're not exactly what you'd call friends. I don't even know, we met at a mixer or something start of sophomore year, then one day he just started barging into my house and eating all my food. He's like this persistent fungus that lives on pizza and bad coffee and is impossible to get rid of. Like--"

"Okay, okay. I get it." Judging by the increasingly vehement edge in Demyx's voice, he was starting to get a lot more too. Certain things from earlier were starting to come together. Before he knew it, he was screwing personal judgment and taking a first sip of Larxene's Mystery Cocktail. It tasted like coconut.

Demyx gave him a startled, guilt-ridden look. "Oh my God, Roxas, I'm sorry. You probably didn't want to find out like this, but this was, like, a million years ago and we were never serious or anything. I mean…" He took a breath, probably readying to launch into some long and elaborate explanation that would reveal way, way more than Roxas ever wanted to know.

"It's alright," Roxas said quickly, holding up his free hand. "We're not… together."

Demyx blinked. "Wait, seriously? Not even a little?"

"No," Roxas said firmly. "I don't know what he told you, but _we_ are just friends." Funny, he'd never realized how much he liked the taste of coconut. This was just amazing. Something of a discovery, really.

"Well, he never specifically said you were together. It's just… wow, this is really a shock. Like, _really _surprising to me."

Roxas narrowed his eyes in puzzlement. "What is that supposed to mean?"

Demyx held up his index finger, like he was listing things off. "For one thing, he hasn't skipped town in _months_."

"And?"

"And," Demyx continued, with great emphasis, "for Axel, that's like a totally big deal. You know, he only transferred to Amherst in sophomore year. Before that he said he'd been going to school on the west coast, but _nobody knows where precisely_. Well, he also said he hitchhiked all the way here from San Diego with a van of hippies but—the point is, ever since he transferred here, he's never stayed in town for longer than a month at a time. He's nearly been thrown out like five times for missing class, and I've received postcards from places like Amancio. That's in _Cuba_."

"I know where Amancio is," Roxas said shortly.

"And that's not all. It's gotten even weirder in the last two weeks. I don't know what happened, but first, he was all depressed and alcoholic for that whole week, and then one day, bam, he just reappeared with his 'new look'."

"If you're referring to that whole Lacoste Essential fiasco, I personally think he's just going through some kind of crisis. Possibly existential in nature. We shouldn't judge."

"Yeah, could be," Demyx said, evidently unconvinced. "But _I_ personally think this change's been coming for awhile now. You're shaking your head but it's true. There has to be something more behind it."

"Sure," Roxas mumbled, but truth be told, he just wished Demyx would let up on the damn subject already. He was starting to feel really sorry for asking in the first place.

Someone inside the house had put in a different CD or something, because in place of trippy foreign lounge, he was suddenly hearing Fleetwood Mac, bluesy and floaty and whimsically sad, undercutting Demyx's yakking voice, saying, "Also, we can't really disregard the fact that he talks about you _all the time_, Roxas. For months now. Apparently even the frat guys at UMass were annoyed by it so."

Really, _really_ sorry.

"You know I actually saw him reading Anna Karenina the other day? I seriously thought I'd mixed up my allergy meds. I mean, there's making subtle changes in your lifestyle, and then there's having a head-on collision with scary Russian literature. It's freaky."

"Yeah," Roxas echoed. "Freaky." He was singing along to the song inside his head, just following the lyrics. 'Thunder only happens when it's raining'? Who came up with that, Head of the No Shit Department?

"Now you're angry. You're mad at me."

"I'm not mad. What could possibly make you think that?"

"You're glaring at your shoes kind of intensely, for one thing. And… uh, didn't Larxene give you that? I really don't think you shouldn't be drinking it--"

"What do you mean?" Roxas asked, honestly puzzled. "I feel fine. Why do you have three heads?" Then the sky fell on his head.

o0o

Despite all evidence to the contrary, Roxas was actually very smart. Straight A-s student and all that, and he even had the test scores to prove that he wasn't the type usually found carelessly wandering into exotic themed college parties and willy-nilly accepting neon-colored alcoholic beverages from scary blondes with professed sadistic leanings.

Except when he was.

To cap off what was already a spectacularly surreal night, he came to consciousness an unspecified amount of time later from a dream in which he had for some reason been reciting the last three lines of T.S. Eliot's _Love Song_. The haunting strains of J. Alfred Prufrock's poetic neurosis were floating around in his foggy mind like waterlogged flotsam, and as he struggled to dispel them, Roxas realized that he—or more correctly, his body was in motion.

He shifted, and got a faceful of what he thought was bottlebrush.

"Welcome back," Axel said, as Roxas tried to blink himself into wakefulness. "You had us freaked out back there, Rox. You need anything? A detour to the emergency room, maybe?"

"No, 'm okay," Roxas replied groggily. He was trying to remember the last time someone had given him a piggyback ride, and not having much success. This brought on worries about brain damage. "God, I said some truly, truly retarded things back there. It's all coming back."

Axel sniggered, because he was an ass. "Yeah, that's to be expected."

"Remind me to apologize to Demyx later."

"It's fine. He's used to it."

"How did the epic battle go?"

"Tell you all about it later," Axel promised. The smile was still evident in his voice. "We had to leave Rosalina behind after you went down, but don't worry, I'll get your ass home safe and sound."

And for some reason, all Roxas got from that was, _Don't worry, I got you_, and that seemed okay. He mentally kicked himself. "I think—no, I have reasons to believe that Larxene drugged my drink," he said, lightly massaging his throbbing temple.

"I'll kill her later," Axel promised, without much conviction.

"That'd be nice. I'll send my thanks from the afterlife," Roxas mumbled. "Christ, my throat's burning up, what the hell did she put in that thing?"

"Probably better off not knowing," Axel said sincerely. "Knowing Larx, it's probably some nasty shit she blackmailed her ex-KGB lover into mixing up in the school labs." His genuine concern was slightly worrying. "At least you're lucid now."

"Yeah." Lucidity, and with it, a whole host of other things his blackout had conveniently suppressed. "Let me down for a minute. Here's fine."

Axel stopped in his track and gingerly lowered Roxas to the ground, untangling his comatose limbs and trying to make sure his feet were safely planted to the pavement before detaching. Roxas made a vague attempt to help, but found it easier to just grope around blindly until he found a vertical surface he could stagger against. It turned out to be a tree.

The moment he regained his bearing, Roxas took a look around, only to realize he had no idea where they were. Some dark, dimly lit street lined with cars and completely emptied of life, but it was probably safe to assume they hadn't meandered far out of Demyx's neighborhood. As good a place as any.

Axel cocked his brow quizzically. "You don't need to puke do you? Because seriously, give me a heads up about that shit, this shirt cost like $300. You're welcome to throw up on Zexion's shoes if you want, but I'd prefer not to be standing in them when you do it, okay?"

"Yeah, I'd do that," Roxas mumbled, rubbing his eyelids and reminding himself to take deep breaths. "If you'd agree to tone down the bullshit a little." He had a feeling he'd be needing the extra oxygen.

"Say what?"

"You know what I mean."

"Not really, no," Axel said tartly. "Let's try that again."

"What's your game?" Roxas said, his voice rising sharply in spite of his best effort to remain calm. "Seriously, what do you think you're playing at?"

"The hell?" Axel said, sounding completely pole-axed. His grin slipped slightly. "Is this the drugs talking?"

Roxas rolled his eyes, taking no trouble to hide his frustration. "Trotting me out there to your friends like some prize horse, and you think I wouldn't have noticed? Should've told me in advance, I could have combed my hair, worn something nice, changed my name to fucking _Seabiscuit_."

"You're crazy," Axel said promptly. "You're imagining things. Possibly hallucinating. I recommend a glass of water and bed."

"Am I?" He was somewhat surprised to find himself practically shouting the words; it made his head hurt a little, then a lot. "All of this isn't occurring in a vacuum, you know. Is this another joke of yours, then, something you thought would be amusing? Just like your awesome stunt in the mall?"

And there it was again, right out on the table. They hadn't even made through the night, it had been stupid of him to even try. Some part of him wondered where all this was suddenly coming from, but some other, brutally honest part just informed him that it was there all along, only now bubbling to the surface. The reason for this development he couldn't be sure of, only that getting to the core of things seemed like a really good idea just then. A really good, anger-driven, chemically-buttressed idea.

"It wasn't some stupid joke, was it," Roxas found himself stating, matter of fact. To his credit, Axel didn't even blink.

As Roxas looked on, he worked his jaw, then tilted his chin and looked at the sky in what appeared to be a silent struggle with himself. It lasted no more than a few seconds. "No shit, Roxas."

"And you have no intention of backing off, do you?"

Axel actually had the gall to smirk. "Bear with me here, but did you ever honestly think I would?"

And Roxas didn't know which was worse, that it hadn't all been a joke for Axel, or the fact that he knew that, and still chose to treat the whole thing as though it were. He understood _nothing_. "Of course not. What does it matter to you what other people want."

Even leaning against the tree, he felt extremely dizzy, and trying to talk just made it worse. His head felt like it was losing an ugly battle to a meat-cleaver, and he wanted to crawl into a hole and sleep for a decade. Nevertheless, he made an effort to push it away, to keep his eyes wide open. This was important. Even if the last year or so had pretty much felt like constant sleepwalking, he wanted to be awake for this.

"You're such a bitch," Axel snapped, scowling darkly. "Has it ever occurred to you that there's just maybe this slightest chance the entire universe doesn't revolve around you?"

On second thought, Roxas now wished he was still asleep, so that when he inevitably broke every bone in Axel's scrawny body, it wouldn't be too difficult to face the consequences. On account of it all being some shitty, horrifically prolonged dream.

"You think you're the one who should be telling me this?" he said acidly. "Really?"

"Go fuck yourself," returned Axel. "And let me tell you something about complying with other people's wishes. Why do you think I'm even bothering with all this prep-unit New England douchebag bullshit? Because I had a sudden epiphany and wanted to reassess my life via my wardrobe? I only did it so you wouldn't have a panic attack every time we're seen together in public."

Roxas opened his mouth, then let it snap shut when he couldn't spit out a ready comeback. It wasn't that he hadn't suspected: he just hadn't anticipated having it thrown in his face like that. "I never asked you to do that," he ended up saying. "If it presents so much hardship for you, maybe you should stop."

"That's not the point! And notice how, even now, you're not exactly denying that you were embarrassed to be seen with me. What, should I start lugging a photobooth around instead?"

"That's not—that is so incredibly stupid," boggled Roxas. "Look, you just don't understand. You never understand any goddamn thing, and then you go and decide all these ridiculous things for yourself in your own twisted head without consulting other people's opinions. Why don't you try considering that maybe I have my personal, undisclosed reasons for—for doing the things I that I did?"

"Maybe I would have if you'd just given me any fucking indication that I was ever supposed to. This may come as a shock to you, Roxas, but I am not actually capable of reading minds. Certainly not _your_ mind, though, believe me, I've tried."

"What, like when you decided that simply becoming a completely different person was the solution?" Roxas retorted. His voice had by now taken on an edge, and he decided that he liked it. Edges were good: edges _cut_, got through all manners of bullshit and straight to the point, and he could use a little clarity right now. "Well, that was brilliant of you. Really, nicely done."

"I didn't—I'm not different," Axel argued obstinately, but Roxas could see that the barb had gotten to him. He sounded shaken, cast adrift. "I'm not a different person because I wear different clothes, alright?"

"The _clothes_ weren't the problem," Roxas said, shaking his head emphatically. "I—look, I liked your clothes." _That_ was probably the drugs talking, and Jesus Christ, here they fucking go, as Axel's blanching face scrunched up, and his shoulders stiffened visibly.

"So it's me, then?" he asked after a moment's silence. Roxas couldn't even think of a way to process that statement, he was too caught up in the plaintive, almost _sulky_ tone Axel was using, the way he kept darting glances over at Roxas from underneath his lashes. "Is that the reason you're not okay with it?"

Not for the first time since the beginning of this never-ending nightmare, Roxas wondered where Axel's infamous temper had disappeared to when they actually needed it, and boy, that wasn't a comforting thought at all, the very implication that, even now, Axel was holding himself back, was somehow subdued on account of Roxas. It freaked him out slightly to entertain the idea that he even had that power over someone—and over _this person_, in particular.

"I didn't say that," Roxas said. It was a non-answer, and he knew it, but he had absolutely nothing else to offer just then. "Don't twist my words. I didn't say that at all."

"So what the hell are you saying?" Axel shot back, throwing up his hands in clear frustration, and right on cue, the fire was immediately back in his voice. "That you _are_ okay with it?"

"It's just not that simple, _alright_?" Roxas almost growled, and really, could this get anymore _Lifetime_. All that was missing from this storyline was the substance abuse angle, and then they'd be fucking _set_. As hilarious as the situation was, he couldn't find it in himself to laugh.

At this point, it suddenly came to Roxas's attention that they were standing obscenely close together. Axel, who had started the conversation at an acceptable distance of at least a foot away from Roxas, had somehow managed to gravitate steadily toward him in its duration, disregarding as always the boundaries of his personal bubble. With his back pressed flush against the tree, Roxas felt a staggering rush of claustrophobia racing up his spine. He hated the feeling—even the _illusion_ of having nowhere to run.

"Step off," he ordered. Axel seemed not to hear, so he said it again, louder and more forcefully, "_Step off_."

"No," Axel said, and as if to make a point, planted both his hands against the tree trunk behind Roxas's head, so that his bent arms were effectively boxing Roxas into place. Their glares locked for a moment, before Axel's shoulders slumped forward without warning. His forehead met tree bark, forcing his entire body to double over at the knees. Roxas was tempted to point out that the position looked thoroughly uncomfortable, but Axel seemed to lack any inclination to move out of it in the immediate future.

They were pressed nearly chest to chest. At this angle, Roxas realized he could no longer see Axel's face, though he could still hear his every shuddering breath, a faint heat that brushed the tip of his right ear. Even through the rising drowsiness, the sensation was enough to send his pulse racing, beads of sweat collecting at the back of his neck. The nearness of his mouth was impossible to ignore, and it was just unbelievable that even this close, Roxas could smell nothing but gross fucking Lacoste.

But if he turned his face just an inch to his right, his nose would be pressed up against Axel's neck, the fabric of that nice shirt—he would find skin.

"I'll hit you," Roxas threatened, and dry-swallowed painfully.

"Wouldn't be the first time."

"Well this time I'm not going to feel sorry about it afterwards, so just move it or--"

"Tell me what you want," Axel cut in suddenly. "Can't you just do that? Just tell me what it is that you want me to do. _What am I supposed to be now?_ Because you don't want me to go, I _know_ that, but I'm seriously getting sick of blundering around in the dark here."

"I didn't ask for any of this," Roxas said. It sounded lost, keening and desperate, words out of a dream, and he couldn't understand any of it. What was he even pleading for here?

Not that it seemed to matter, as Axel appeared not to notice. Still facing away from Roxas, he was talking nonstop, in that lost, rambling way people had when they sounded their thoughts aloud to an empty room, all the words rushed together in a breathless stream. It was as though Roxas, the tree, and the dark, deserted street spreading endlessly around them were all swallowed up in Axel's empty room.

"I have to admit, it was fun at first. You're this gigantic bundle of neuroses that could go off at any moment, and I knew off the bat there wasn't a chance in hell I'd be able to stay away from that. So I never even tried. No, I just had to go for it, and believe me when I say that when I go for something, I go balls out."

"I know you do," Roxas said. "I'm a freak, and you can't resist a challenge. Sorry this is no longer fun for you." He might even mean that, mean it a little. It had been fun at first, even he couldn't deny that, and it hadn't stopped being fun even after a pattern had begun to emerge out of all the craziness. They'd made a good run of it. How did everything go so wrong?

"No, it isn't," Axel agreed vehemently. "But like hell I'm going to back off. Like _hell_. And it's not about winning, I just need—fuck, I need some help, Rox. Some kind of sign, okay? If you can't meet me halfway, then a quarter would be nice. Shit, I'd even settle for a tenth of a sixteenth. Just give me something to work with, alright, because I can't be who you want me to be if I have no idea what the hell that is."

"But I didn't _want_ you to change," Roxas said miserably. "I didn't want _anything_ to change. Things were fine the way they were, why don't you get that? Why is that not enough for you?"

To his questions, Axel remained silent, and in that long, dark moment, Roxas sincerely wished he could see his eyes, though he knew it wouldn't help a goddamn thing. He had to get away now, Roxas decided. If he stood here a moment longer, Axel's presence would seep into him and effortlessly overwhelm all his defenses, and then too close would suddenly become not close enough, and the worst thing of all was that Axel could succeed without even realizing it. And Roxas would let him.

"Well, you're right," Axel said at last. "I don't get that, and I don't get how you do. You've always been such a big fucking mystery, I never have any idea what's going on in your screwed up head at all."

If Roxas wasn't careful, the sheer irony of that statement might choke him.

"The thing is," he began, wincing in utter exhaustion, and had to stop when his voice came out with a frightening degree of rawness, like it had been scraped out of his throat, leaving a sting like a chemical burn. He sucked in a long breath, and tried again: "The thing is you're probably my best friend right now."

At this, Axel mercifully _did_ step off: he practically jumped away from Roxas, as if electrocuted, or jerked away by an invisible hook. Contact broken, Roxas looked up just in time to catch the dark, bewildered look that flashed through Axel's eyes, but he was too tired now to try and figure out what it could mean.

In truth, he was probably afraid to admit that he knew what it meant already—that somebody else's heart was breaking and it was his doing, that he had done that to yet another person. His track record was just looking more and more impressive by the day.

"You're my best friend," he whispered, reaching for the last reserve of whatever strength and determination he could dig up, trying hard to keep his eyes open, to not be a coward. It was the least he could do. "You're my best friend, which is why it's not okay."

The fatigue was getting the better of him now, darkness falling over his field of vision, melting right through his shuttered eyelids; a certain heaviness growing somewhere near his tailbone, dragging and huge. His tongue felt swollen in his mouth, slick with a nauseating chemical aftertaste, his mind scattered, no longer capable of drawing up a single lucid thought. He was sweating profusely, the night air freezing on his damp skin. Seagirls singing each to each. Till human voices wake us...

"I could use the wake-up call, hold the drowning." Weird. That sounded just like his voice, though he wasn't conscious of formulating the words. If only he had something to focus on, something to grasp onto, he was losing this fight and going down fast.

"Roxas, hey--"

Axel's eyes hadn't been the first thing Roxas had noticed about him on the day they'd first met, but they had probably been somewhere up there on the list. He had never stopped noticing them since.

- - -

**TBC

* * *

**

**Notes: **Both Larxene and Roxas quoted Marquis de Sade in their exchange. That was the point behind that whole scene. Retarded, I know. I need to be put down.


	10. Chapter X

**Title:** My Girlfriend, Who Lives In Canada

**Pairings:** Axel/Roxas, Olette/Rai, SoRiKai, and Zemyx

**Disclaimer:** The Kingdom Hearts franchise and its characters do not belong to me.

**Summary:** At this point, I don't even know.

**A/N/Requisite Apology:** Unexpected update is unexpected! The number of readers for this story must have dwindled to three by now, but I am determined to see this to the end. I am like Britney, man, every time you think I'm down for the count, I'll just come right back at you with a (questionable) hit single. Now let's pretend I didn't write this chapter while mainlining Lady GaGa.

* * *

**X.**

The door opened with a whisper behind him. For a second, Roxas wondered if his dad had finally stocked up enough fatherly indignation to break their unspoken code of silence. Maybe he'd talked to Dr. Bernstein and learned that Roxas hadn't bothered showing up for any of his appointments for weeks. Yes, this was a definite possibility. Naminé wouldn't rat him out, but goddamn Bernstein might have.

Compared to his near-catatonic monomania, skipping out on his therapist once in awhile didn't seem like such a big deal, but then again, it was hard to tell what made his father tick these days.

This could be a confrontation. He didn't know how to feel about that.

"Hey, Roxas."

_That_, he wasn't expecting, and to be honest, Roxas wasn't sure how to feel about it either.

"Liam? Is that you?"

"Your sister told me you'd be in here."

He got up a little too quickly, and his knees almost buckled, the muscles in his thighs burning from prolonged inactivity. His mother's vintage copy of T.S. Eliot's _Complete Poems_, unopened in his lap, fell soundlessly to the floor. Just recently, he'd found it bearable to read again, though not for any great length of time without making him slightly ill between the eyes. It was an improvement.

At this point, he realize that the room was dark, a near Alaskan winter from the blasting AC. Dusk had fallen at some indeterminate point, and when Liam flicked on the overhead light, Roxas was nearly knocked over by the sudden glare. He blinked slowly, shaking off the owlish grogginess, and reassessed the sight before him. It was no hallucination; Liam Cooper was standing in the dark doorway, slouchy and disheveled as ever, brown curls falling haphazardly across his high forehead. The uncertainty on his face, though, was a whole new thing.

"Hello," Roxas said, with some difficulty. There was a nasty, hollowed-out sensation in his throat, like the feeling after dry-swallowing a large pill. "What, um, are you doing here?"

But he could probably guess. In some other person's life—like, as an example, Liam's—it was the second to last day of August, and the new school year would be starting the following week. The streets outside probably smelled of spiral notebooks and freshly sharpened pencils. Being depressed in New York was a brutal experience. By the time the end of summer vacation rolled around, the perfect solitude of the family room and the rocking chair and the endlessly repeated flood of sunlight had begun to thaw, losing its protective, formerly unrelenting grip, and Roxas was beginning to feel restless.

And now, there was this.

Instead of answering his question, Liam slouched slowly across the room until he was directly facing the large French windows. There he stopped, and proceeded to shuffle back and forth nervously. He pulled the lace curtains shut, then snapped them open again, gazing intently into the darkness in the garden. It was all very mysterious and perplexing.

"What have you been up to?" Roxas said awkwardly, trying to see if it would make Liam turn around to face him. It didn't.

"You know."

"I don't know, actually," Roxas said. If Liam was trying to fake him out, it obviously wasn't going to work. "I haven't seen or heard from you all summer. You disappeared." He hadn't meant to sound accusatory—it wasn't like he held a grudge or anything—but somehow, the words felt right in his mouth. "And would you just look at me when we talk, please?"

Liam finally stopped fussing with the curtains, and turned around. He was possibly flushing but it was hard to tell with his dark complexion. "Okay," he said, breathing heavily. "I know you're mad at me, and I know I deserve it. I've been a dick. But do you think you could hear me out for a sec?"

"It's okay," Roxas mumbled, sliding his eyes shut in exhaustion. He was deflating already, he could tell. It took too much effort to keep up the affront, to keep anything up these days. He couldn't go to school, couldn't even talk to his family, how could he do this? "I haven't exactly made it easy for anyone to solicit my company. And to be honest, these last few months, I wouldn't want to be around me either."

"That's not it," Liam said quickly, making a face like an eggshell cracking, falling apart from the top down, and Roxas suddenly felt _terrible_. This was Liam, his _best friend_ in the whole world—their edges came together and met evenly, in well-spoken English and traded notes denoting scandalous lies about their draconian teachers, rude scribbling in the margins of schoolbooks testifying to their utter and complete failure to understand the human female's anatomy. This wasn't what best friends did.

It soon became apparent that Liam didn't want Roxas to "hear him out" on any particular matter, because what he said next was, "You've lost weight. You don't look good, Roxas. What are you doing?"

"Trying to be a bohemian poet," Roxas said inanely. "It's not working out so hot."

"Yeah, I can see that," Liam said, just to go along with it. Here it was, the make or break—this conversation could make the U-turn back to light-footed normalcy, or it could go to hell in a hand basket. "You haven't been coming to SAT prep. The teachers are all really worried."

Roxas made a vague motion with his head, as if to say, "What of it?"

"I heard you broke up with Julia."

So this was what people talked about when they were trying not to talk about death. Silently, Roxas congratulated his friend on an excellent choice of topic. "So?"

"So… what happened? You and Little Miss Brearley, I thought you guys had a good thing going there. What about all those afternoons racing through Central Park at recess to meet her and split your brown bag lunch? I was gonna put that in my first novel."

"Oh yeah," Roxas chuckled humorlessly, leaning his head back against the chair. "Blue skies, yellow sundresses, holding hands in the Museum of Natural History. Sounds like a bestseller in the making."

"Maybe if I added vampires," Liam said, smirking wryly to acknowledge the cheap shot. "Julie, Julie, Julia… oh well, I guess I never really got to know her all that well. She was cute, I suppose. With the short dark hair. Kind of skinny, pale, pixie-ish in the face. Very Middle Earth."

Roxas could no longer contain himself at this point. "I'm sorry, Liam. I get that you're trying to help, but I don't think I can do this right now. Maybe I can call you later…?"

"I'm just saying that she's the kind of girl I would go out with," Liam rushed on, somewhat manically. "…because of the whole part of the thing where she looks like a boy."

What was that?

It occurred to Roxas perhaps he should have said that out loud. By the time he did, however, Liam was already pretending nothing had happened. He'd gone back to shifting around where he stood, restless, frenetic, like an overcharged molecule. Curiouser and curiouser.

So Roxas said, "It was never going to last," and remembered to modulate his voice carefully. "She was just, I don't know, my shiny new thing." That sounded awful, but even if they had been together for almost a year, he knew very well that had never stopped being the case, and damn if he needed another reason to add to the ever-growing list of why he was a total shit.

"I remember when _I_ was your shiny new thing," Liam said, with the dreamy look in his eyes that Roxas remembered from innumerable half-baked schemes, that time they rickrolled the Glee Club during their end-of-year performance, scampish ventures from geologic eons ago. There was a before, just like there was clearly an after in which he now lived, that much he knew, but what he also knew was that, once upon a time, yes, Liam had been his shiny wonder, the one out of a million prize he'd won with unbelievable good fortune that he had never stopped being astounded by.

In those simple, distant days of yore (otherwise known as freshman year) that obviously he was never going to talk about, he would come home from school and prattle endlessly about how great and awesome and cool his new friend was. Lost in the memory, he didn't notice Liam stepping forward, and looked up to find his classically handsome face hanging directly above him.

"The thing is, I don't share very well," Liam said, and slowly leaned down, bracing his arms on either side on the chair's cushioned armrests. Roxas tried to figure out what that strange undertone in his voice, the dark, softly luminous look in his brown eyes were all about, but came up blank.

"I think I preferred it when I was your new shiny thing," Liam continued, still in the same hushed voice.

"And what are you now? Old and lackluster?" Roxas said feebly, even though the joke was stale. He felt trapped, cornered, for no particular reason.

"I don't know. What do you think?"

Whatever Roxas thought, it never got the chance to coalesce into words, because even as Liam's swimmers' shoulders heaved forward, sliding down with the dipping motion of his head, he had captured Roxas's mouth with his lips, pressing in from the outer atmosphere like gravity, a suffocating force. Roxas had exactly one perfectly crystallized moment of detached fascination in which he stared at the ripple of muscle under Liam's shirt where his arm met his shoulder, before he reached up and stroked two fingers down the side of Liam's face, learning the feel of his skin, and yes, Liam was very handsome, genius's eyes and athlete's grace, and yes, perhaps the temptation had always been there, lurking under the surface. Perhaps all his life he had always been heading toward this pinpoint conclusion, and before he knew it, he was hurtling in, headfirst.

The rough water surged victoriously over the collapsing dams, flooding Roxas's perfect island of solitude. He reached for salvation, reached for those elusive human voices, missed, and subsequently drowned.

o0o

Nobody was around when Roxas woke up, and in many ways, he was immensely glad because when he opened his eyes and saw a giant clown's face inches from his own, he very nearly crapped his pants.

Then sensory perception kicked back into gear, and he realized it was just a puppet, and a normal-sized one that. What it was doing sharing his pillow and gazing at him with its unsettling glass eyes remained a mystery, one that he really preferred not to dwell upon for any length of time.

The only source of illumination was the work lamp on the desk, which cast a kind of diffuse, soft yellow glow that blended easily with the shadows, merging into indeterminate brown areas. Roxas sat up on the narrow dorm-issue bed—slowly, because attempting to return to vertical axis seemed to cause an entire freight train to crash messily into the side of his temporal lobe. His mouth felt disgusting, registered biohazard, a chemical, absurdly coconut-y taste coating his tongue and starkly reminding him of his _enormous stupidity_. He sat stunned for minute, buttocks already sore from the rock-hard mattress, before venturing a cautious glance at his new surroundings.

Roxas would be lying if he said that at least some part of him wasn't excited, because to him, being in Axel's dorm room—and really, where else could this be?—was like infiltrating the inner sanctum of a secret cult, where answers to arcane mysteries of the universe could be found and the knowledge you left with might scar you for the rest of your life.

This part of him would be colossally disappointed, however, because the reality fell unforeseeably short of expectations.

It would be a gross understatement to say that Axel's room partook in almost none of the bizarre qualities found in the inhabitant. Aside from the seriously creepy clown puppet squished into one corner of the bed—and Roxas seriously wasn't going to pursue that line of thought and all the horrifying implications it entailed, no siree—this room could have been any random college dorm room anywhere across the continental United States. Dirty clothes in messy piles strung haphazardly across the invisible floor. The spartan desk-and-roller-chair combo. Crinkled food wrappers. Couple of posters, mostly of bands Roxas was too cool to listen to when he was _twelve_.

Really, it was disappointing. Almost lame. At the very least he'd have expected the walls to be papered in pages ripped out of a Tijuana bible.

"Well", Roxas decided in a mumble, "obviously I'm just going to have to get over this _crushing letdown_ and get on with my life." Obviously, because there were still important tasks at hand and he couldn't afford to go to pieces now. The moment he was certain that standing up wouldn't cause the Milky Way to tumble down onto his head, Roxas swung his legs over the side of the bed, carefully propping himself up.

At that very instance, something _did_ flutter down from above, barely skirting his nose, and he nearly dislocated his hips jerking backward, certain that a chunk of the galaxy had come for his soul.

He eased down his thumping heart from the self-induced stress, and got to his knees to examine the object that had taken nearly a decade off his life. It turned out to be a postcard.

The glossy photo depicted a resplendent seascape, twinkling glass-clad buildings dotting a curving coastline, white sand hugging jewel-colored water. The words BARCELONA were emblazoned in yellow across the top of the picture, in a font that Roxas suspected, with dull despair, might be a souped-up version of Papyrus. He flipped it over. There was no postmark, no stamp, nothing written in the address box, but what he did find was a poem, scribbled in a careless, loopy hand, the last two lines of which happened to be:

"_If we'll meet again. Be happy.  
If you hear this, send a postcard_."

And beneath that:

_Remember the bowl of oranges, skinny armadillo_. _Con todo mi cariño_.

_Elisabet_

As if in a dream, Roxas felt his face lifting of its own accord, guided by a floating fog. His eyes found the ceiling, and there, he found it. The secret, the arcane mystery of the universe, which he had somehow, quite inadvertently, been let in on, for no reason he could understand.

Postcards. Taped to nearly every inch of the small ceiling were postcards, possibly hundreds in number though he knew on some rational level that there couldn't possibly be that many, not even close. The room was dimly lit, but Amherst dorm ceilings were low-set and Roxas had 20/10 vision, so he could vaguely make out letters, some goofy, some elegant and curling, others blocky and non-descript. Sapporo. Portland. Birmingham. Detroit. Munich. Amancio. All the gleaming images of distant places, both foreign and familiar, shielding from view the possibilities of words, face up and pressed to the ceiling, drawing an intricate map of the world—or perhaps just one man's perspective of it. A man who had lived so much life but was still so greedy for it that he wanted to take it with him, have it surround him all day, every day, but Roxas was reaching for metaphors now.

And in the center of it all, surrounded by stock photos of important landmarks, as if holding the system together according to some indecipherable rule, was a line of text, carefully written in all upper-case with black marker in a spiraling pattern reminiscent of gastropod shells, the eye of a colorful, fractured storm.

EVERYTHING WAS BEAUTIFUL AND NOTHING HURT.

o0o

Roxas found Axel basically passed out on the futon in the common room. His sleep posture hadn't changed. He was curled up on his side, like before, with all his limbs bent into themselves in crooked, uncomfortable-looking angles, like before, and his face was smooth and undefended and free of tension, the recalcitrant child in slumber, just like before, the only exception to this familiar pattern being that the light that fell on his sleeping form wasn't patchy and apple-green, but instead the soft white glow of the floor lamp standing at one end of the futon.

Another difference: the book splayed open across his thigh. The thickness of the spine looked suspiciously familiar. Roxas bent down for a closer inspection, taking care not to breathe too loudly.

_Anna Karenina_.

("There's making subtle changes in your lifestyle, and then there's having a head-on collision with scary Russian literature.")

For no reason at all, Roxas took note of the fact that Axel was still dressed in his "party wear", the same form-fitting dark shirt, now wrinkled and creased, but still reeking of _quality_. Out of place, just like the ridiculous ponytail that the wild red hair was still obstinately trapped in. Zexion's nice shoes lay gracelessly on their sides on the floor where they had evidently been discarded post-haste. Their soles, he noticed, were noticeably unworn, the kind of soles not known for long journeys.

These things brought to Roxas's mind all the thoughts that had been accruing since the start of the night, but he wasn't going to give them the time of day, not just yet. He didn't have all the answers, but his head held more clarity in this moment than it had ever been capable of for the entirety of the last _year_, and if he didn't take advantage of it now, he would inevitably lose his nerve. There was not a moment to lose.

An electric clock on the mantelpiece informed him that it was 3:37 am. Earlier than he'd expected; it felt like he'd been sleeping for a hundred years, or maybe that was just his chronic wistful thinking disease acting up again. With one last look, Roxas went back into Axel's bedroom, the room with the crisscrossing police tapes, and closed the door softly behind him.

There, he pulled out his phone. He didn't look at the ceiling, fought the urge to lose himself in that fragmented collage, and instead, forced himself to push a phone number long in disuse but never forgotten, having been committed to sense memory. Speed dial number four.

He'd hedged his bet. No turning back now.

While the phone rang, Roxas went to the window and pushed it open, leaning halfway out into the open night, sucking in a cool breeze to fortify his courage. He was 98% sure of this decision, which was pretty sure by his standards, but that was no guarantee he wouldn't chicken out at the last minute and leap through the window in an effort to abandon ship.

The exhale had barely left his body when the ringing next to his ear stopped and a familiar voice streamed in through the phone, crisp but weary. "Hello?"

Roxas closed his eyes, as if to reassess the journey before him. "Hey, Liam," he said, taking the first deep plunge.

o0o

He said, "Did I wake you?" in a modulated voice, casual as casual.

Said, "Probably not. I'm pretty sure you were awake."

There was a long silence on the other end, interrupted by a shudder of breath, rending and all drawn-out in the silence of the night, before Liam's voice came rushing at him in a full-frontal assault. "Oh God." Pause. "Roxas?"

Roxas closed his eyes, and didn't bother to halt the smile already crawling onto his lips, a habit he'd thought long-lost but had apparently only been in hiding. "You really need to start looking at Caller ID before picking up, you know?"

"You know that goes against everything I believe in," Liam said, shaky but with audible effort. "I like to live on the edge, relish the element of surprise."

"Yeah, and I suspect that lifelong aspiration is a direct factor for the disproportionate amount of time you spend in Saturday detention."

That had to have done it. Roxas would dearly have liked—out of mostly cowardice—to waste his free nighttime minutes shooting the breeze with Liam in the kind of casually comedic vein they both knew was no longer a possibility, at least not on any sustainable basis. But nobody made 4 am phone calls for no reason, especially not when that call had been preceded by a six-month silence, and despite the fact that Roxas threatened to self-harm a lot, he had no real desire to do it, not unless this entire ill-advised foray into seeking closure went any more pear-shaped and rendered cutting an absolute necessity.

Really, it was the mention of school that brought it on. To sum it up, on a November afternoon not unlike any other, Roxas had been summarily expelled from the Collegiate School of the Ivy Prep School League where he had been enrolled since kindergarten, for reasons of violent misconduct and various minor counts of rule violations. On that same windblown, grayscaled afternoon, two-thirds of his family had made the decision to uproot from the city their brood had lived in since something totally ridiculous like 1875, and move to a sleepy college town in New England, in the hopes that their lives would finally stop making repeated attempts to utterly and completely fall apart.

None of it was anything Roxas would bother reiterating to Liam, since he had been a part of it all anyway, had in fact occupied front row and center seat. He knew where the chips had fallen.

Still, maybe just a minute longer.

"So what are you doing up so late on a Friday night?" Saturday morning, actually. "Putting the finishing touches on your novel? What was it called now, 'The Art of Cartographical Cardiology'?"

Liam gave a short bark of laughter, hoarse and not at all inconspicuous. "Oh that old thing? No, I scrapped it a long time ago. Sentimental high school pulp. I'm working on something new now, tentatively titled '358/2 Days of Bullshit'. It's going to be groundbreaking. Jonathan Safran Foer will call on the phone, and I'll be _too busy_."

"I keep telling you, it's not a literary feud if the other guy doesn't know about it. But okay, I'll look out for your name on the bestsellers list." He switched his phone to the other ear, flexing his tired fingers absently. "So, you writing right now?"

It wasn't difficult to imagine Liam sitting in his messy, overcrowded room with the walls all painted blue and an antique atlas taped over the bed, the sight of his long back and ridged spine bent over the writing desk in the yellow spill of lamplight as he pored over some elaborate project guaranteed to change western civilization and the world as they knew it. It was an image etched into such deeply ingrained familiarity that he could pull it out of his mind at will despite having paid it no thought for many, many moons, and suddenly, the distance felt _alive_, aching with lost possibilities.

o0o

In the weeks following Liam's visit, things had changed. These changes included Roxas leaving the house for the first time in weeks, and even that wasn't the most remarkable fact. He went to _school_. There was a reason to, you see, and that knowledge alone filled his head with so much noise that it was difficult to pay attention to anything else, to form any structured concept except perhaps the one that lay at the very core of his being, the breathless, _suffocated_ sense of new discovery. He had been reveling in the emptiness for so long, all hollow and brittle, that he had to relearn how to move, to live through the day.

_Gay_. Every day, he tested out the word in his head. _I'm gay_. Rolled it around, trying to find a place to fit it in with all the rest of him, pinning it to the forefront of his mind like some kind of Public Service Announcement.

It was something to hold on to, like finding water at the bottom of a dry well, a dark prayer.

And everyday Roxas walked the five blocks separating his apartment on Amsterdam Avenue and the ugly, ultra-modern piece of architectural garbage that was his school's main building on the corner of 78th and Broadway. Upon arrival, he went straight to the library, where he hid in the crook in the back and browsed unreadable books and unraveled like an old sweater, at least until the bell rang for study hall and Liam snuck in after him, treading a second set of footprints in what was clearly becoming their secret room. He remembered it, even now, the air conditioner that practically sucked heat out of the air, a cube of space so still you could hear the hot, desperate breaths that they traded furtively between each other, lips to lips.

Roxas didn't sleep with Liam after their first kiss, or even the numerous ones following that, but the weekend after the first week of school, he got permission to stay at his friend's overnight. He ended up in Liam's bedroom, messy, overcrowded, the walls painted blue, found himself unbuttoning a Collegiate-issue shirt as Liam clumsily shucked him out of his jeans. Roxas lost his virginity on the bed with the antique atlas taped over it, with his gaze fixed on the colorful tacks pinned to the various locations that a fifteen-years-old Liam had planned to conquer on his quest for world domination. The storm of noise in his head never once subsiding, drowning out all the rest.

He did not find out until later, sneaking out the door in the early September morning, that Liam had not gotten permission from his parents for Roxas to stay over that night.

And so it went on, and even though Roxas went to school, that didn't mean he went to class. On the rare occasion that he'd accidentally find himself in a classroom, he performed so spectacularly poorly, came so damn near to failing everything that, in retrospect, they wouldn't have any choice but to throw him out anyway, even if he hadn't cracked two of his knuckles across Liam's perfect, aristocratic nose in the middle of study hall that one afternoon in November.

o0o

Presently, Liam snorted dryly, and said, "Unfortunately, I have to forsake my magnum opus in favor of the decidedly crass and terrible discipline of World History. I have 36 hours to learn the entire annals of 20th century warfare. What can I say, senioritis hit me hard and sudden."

"Even if you flunk all your final exams, I refuse to believe that you don't have enough credits to graduate," Roxas said, feeling a spiteful twist start up in his stomach. "Where've you decided to go next year, anyway? Out of the dozens of top-tier schools that you've so obviously been offered admission to."

"Columbia," Liam answered gamely. "My father thinks it's a blight upon the family's name that I turned down Yale, but… you know me. I could never leave New York."

"Yes," Roxas said woodenly. "Once upon a time, I believed that myself."

He hadn't meant to let so much slip out the gate, wasn't even aware that something _had_. Whatever it was, it made Liam sigh into the phone and say, "I wish you were here, Roxas. I really do, I wish you never left. It's not just about what happened, how we left it off. It's not the same without you."

How they left it off meant that last day when Liam had shuffled into their library hideaway with his head hung low and his eyes resolutely diverted, so that Roxas had been cut off from their usual warmth, and when Roxas had leaned in for a kiss, a touch, _something_, Liam had pulled away, pulled away and held him back and said, "This was a bad idea. We shouldn't do this anymore."

Some other stuff had happened back there too, exchanged words, lines of reasoning that went nowhere and cut like a knife, but all of it had parsed in a blur to Roxas, everything fuzzy around the edges, and clarity hadn't swum back into place until the precise moment he had swung his fist, sending Liam tumbling out into the main area of the library, sprawled on the floor and clutching his broken nose.

The rest, as they said, was history, but perhaps some traces of that anger were alive in him still, because the next words coming out of his mouth were, "Don't worry about it. In time, you'll find new bridges to burn."

There was a hitch of breath on the line, the kind passed through gritted teeth, and a very mean part of Roxas drank in the satisfaction, smelling the blood that had been drawn.

It wasn't just about making the discovery that one liked Tab A instead of Slot B—although that was certainly an important component—but rather, the issue, the heart of the matter, buried deep in tangles of veined flesh and cardiac muscle, had to do with the fact that his best friend had suddenly turned into the person whose back he slammed into library shelves in sloppy make-out sessions, whose hand slicked down the front of his uniform trousers and drew from his lips hitches of breath that had to be immediately muffled out of fear of discovery. And then—even _more_ improbably—that person had turned into some shifty-eyed stranger informing Roxas that not only he couldn't afford to be gay anymore, but more specifically, he couldn't afford to be _gay with Roxas_, because what would his parents say, them with their vacation houses in both the Hamptons _and_ Martha's Vineyard, their old money, their _political status_.

The world had changed and Roxas had thought he'd known all about its ugly side. He'd been pretty much wrong about that.

And he remembered how, for the longest time, he hadn't been able to figure it out. He had roiled and vexed and agonized for months over one single question, _Why me? _It figured that, by the time he found the answer, it was no longer important to him.

Roxas had known Liam for the better part of two years, and in that time, Liam had taught him many things, some significant, some frivolous, all of it deserving of memorization. But most importantly, what Liam had taught him was that even the best people in the world, the nicest and kindest and most deserving of admiration, could nevertheless fuck you over in ways you could never imagine. In the intersection where your needs and wants met theirs, everything was fair game. Liam had scarred him all over; little wonder then he had gotten into the habit of prematurely criticizing, underselling, drawing grim conclusions about everything he encountered in an effort to lower his expectations and avoid being let down by the reality.

No, that wasn't entirely true, and it wasn't fair. For some time now, Roxas had ceased to pay due attention to things like fairness, but that was an indulgence, a bad habit he needed to break himself out of.

This was six months after the fact, during which time a great deal of reconstruction had taken place, and right now, Roxas needed this like he needed a roundhouse to the nut sack.

So he drew in a long, sobering breath, smelling the cold in the edges of the air—he sucked it up, and said, "In all honesty, I didn't really mind at the time. It wasn't like gayness came out of nowhere and beat me over the head and dragged me into an alley. I had someone, and just my luck, that someone was you. Couldn't have asked for someone better to cut my teeth on."

There was silence on the other end, long and resolute and soaking his words in like a sponge, for which Roxas was glad.

"That doesn't mean you get off scot free though," he added lightly, blade sheathed. "My mom died, I was all fucked up_. _What the hell were you thinking?"

Even that was said without much—if _any_—venom, and that was how Roxas knew that he was okay. He had truly moved beyond the person he had been then, full of hurt and bewilderment, and the New Roxas, the New Roxas could accept things as they came to him, and this, even this was okay. He could accept this, and it was important that he let Liam know that, because he knew too well the feeling of having the door shut to his face, the deep, persistent cold. He would never do that to another person, not ever again.

"I wasn't thinking," Liam said softly, at last. His voice had gained a faraway quality, flickering in sadness. "You were my best friend and I was stupid and panicked and didn't stop to think it over. I'm a moron, a total shithead, I fucked up—I know I fucked up big time, God, I'm so sorry, I don't even have words—"

Indeed he was, had probably been sorry all this time. Roxas knew all about the hours Liam had spent on his street corner in the days following his expulsion, days that had been filled with the commotion involved in packing up a life, helping his dad facilitate their sudden but imperative move. He knew—even if he hadn't seen any of this himself—that Liam had looked like shit, his nose still broken and swollen and cut, that he had been sorry, but hopeful at the same time.

He also knew that, at the time, the Old Roxas would never have found it in himself to forgive him.

"It doesn't matter now," he found himself saying, flat and with a strange, unaccustomed gentleness. "Honestly, Liam, I didn't call to beat you up over this shit. I didn't know what I was getting into, but neither did you. We took our friendship to a place it wasn't ready to go, and even if you had made the first step, I pretty much followed. Really, I don't recall being concussed and dragged along by the arm or anything."

In his mind, he could see a snapshot of his former friend, half a year younger and still standing outside Roxas's apartment building, surrounded by dead leaves. His face held the same guilt, the same weakness, the fear and loneliness and desperate wish to be loved that Roxas knew to undulate constantly within himself, a mirror image.

Tiredly, he reached out to that scared boy, in a gesture of grace.

_I forgive you. You can go now, because I forgive you._

"So yeah. That's all I wanted to say. I should probably go, my cell battery's been wailing dying cries at me for a couple of minutes now. So…"

"Maybe we could talk sometimes," Liam said quickly, desperate and perhaps slightly last-ditch. "Or hang out, even. If you ever feel like coming down here, you know..."

"Yeah, sure. Maybe."

"Take care, Roxas. I really mean it."

"You too. Good bye, Liam."

And that was how Liam Cooper entered his past.

o0o

Like a sleepwalker coming out of a long, exhaustive dream, Roxas felt completely drained—but in a good way. He closed the window, and pressed his face against the cool glass pane, just letting himself hang there for a moment, arms loose and easy at his sides. Allowing the tension to dissipate.

_I won't think about all this now, _he told himself, eyes closed and swimming with fatigue. _I'll take a leaf out of Scarlett's book and think about it tomorrow—or whenever it is that seems most appropriate._

It became obvious that he couldn't stand like that forever when his phone beeped at him irritably. He hadn't been lying about those dying cries.

He was just about to turn the phone off when he noticed the little icon that indicated he had a voicemail. It was from his dad. The time of the message was 1:45, so Roxas figured he had still been deep in the magical land of coconut-flavored hallucinogen when the call had come in, and with his phone set to vibration, there was no way he could have noticed. There was barely any life left on the battery, but he hoped it would give him enough time to hear what his dad had wanted to say at nearly 2 in the morning.

And what he heard was:

"_Hey Roxas, I figured you'd be asleep by now, but I have to call and tell you that I, well, I won't be getting back by tomorrow. I—something's come up. It's about your sister. I got a call from her school and she's—she's in the hospital. I don't have a lot of details but I'm on the way—I'm actually on the train right now, heading over there and I will call again as soon…"_

At this point, the phone died, and the floor went out beneath his feet.

In the years to come, Roxas would look back and wonder what exactly had taken place at that exact moment when his father's voice went silent and the light flickered out over his eyes. He would wonder about the minor explosion that had gone off in his skull, short-circuiting all the racing neurons and sending his thoughts—his sense of rationality—haywire. He would wonder about what had happened next, wonder how his clever, compartmentalized brain had been unable to process the fact that the level of fear was totally out of proportion to the actual situation, and not understand any of it at all, just like how he couldn't understand what was happening within and all around him in this moment of critical meltdown.

When he opened his eyes again, he was already halfway out the door, but at this very convenient point, his legs completely went liquid, giving out and sending Roxas crashing to the floor in an ungraceful heap, muscles constricting in tight, painful seizures. A sharp pain materialized between his eyes, crawling down his arms to the far reaches of his fingertips. His entire body felt like it had been shot through with electricity a thousand bolts strong. He couldn't breathe, his head was pounding like a regimental drum, and all the strength had gone out in his limbs. What was happening to him?

With a kind of detached awareness, as though in an out-of-body experience, Roxas recognized that he was having a panic attack, which was probably karmic comeuppance for his tendency to abuse clinomorphisms.

The thought got pushed out of his mind immediately as another wave of tremors washed over his entire body, and as he rolled over on the floor, lungs bursting for oxygen, the room seemed to disappear, faded out of focus and melting into nonbeing. He thrashed around on the floor helplessly, mooing like a cow for mercy. His chest was tingling with shooting needles, his throat all closed up like an allergy sufferer going into anaphylactic shock. He had no control over his body: it had revolted against him. He was going to faint, he was going to die and die _soon_, if this continued—God he didn't want to die, but he couldn't live, not like this…

"What the—Roxas?"

Somewhere, a voice was speaking.

"Roxas, what the hell's going? What's wrong with you? Hey, Roxas, look at me!"

There was a clear edge of authority in that command, but even if Roxas wanted to comply, he couldn't, too busy dry-heaving on the floor, retching in long, painful gasps, throwing up nothing but sour spit.

And then, suddenly, he was being lifted—supported under his armpits and steered carefully, up and away from the floor by some invisible force. His legs still shook with spasms and could in no way hold him up, so he gave his weight entirely over to the unseen force, for once feeling no desire to escape, even though his mind was racing, screaming and swirling down a dark, dark drain, too fast and mad to catch a hold of.

But now he was being set down on a soft surface, and that invisible force was still there, keeping a hold on him, firm but reassuring, keeping him in an upright positions, slow hands smoothing concentric motions along his back, a soothing presence, like a down comforter, soft sheets. It gave him just enough strength to tear himself away from the desperate struggle for breath and look up, up to where Axel's familiar green eyes were wide and dark with concern, just this side of frightened, having materialized from the black ether specifically for Roxas to lock gaze with in that nanosecond of a time window.

Then more of the picture cleared, and Roxas became hazily aware that Axel's mouth was moving, silently, in slow motion, framed by his white face. Another minute, and words began to stream in, muffled and incoherent at first, fading in and out like a wartime broadcast. It sounded like Axel was talking under water, but he focused on the sound of Axel's voice with all his will, the effort squeezing hot tears from his eyes that burned trails down his cheeks, and finally, _finally_, he could make out the words that Axel was saying to him, over and over, in a slow, clearly enunciated voice.

"Count backward from 10. Do it, _right now_."

Even in his crazed mind, Roxas recognized this as the standard protocol for dealing with anxiety attacks. He tried to reach for the numbers, found them slipping away from his grasp, maddeningly elusive.

His thoughts drifted inexplicably to his freshman year French class, in which he had been a deplorable student anyway and had only passed by the skin of his teeth with something like a D- average. But the language that had escaped his enfeebled understanding had also left behind a bizarre arsenal of basic phrases, stock tourist lines that Roxas had forced himself to rote-memorize in a transparent effort to forestall Mrs. Sempé's terrible wrath, until they had been burned irrevocably into his mind, and in this confused moment, he began to recite them aloud, stumbling over the guttural sounds he had always found unpleasant and tripping his way through in a likely horrible accent, groping for clarity.

_Être. _

_Avoir._

_Parlez-vous anglais__? _

_Répétez__, __s'il vous plaît__. _

_Je ne sais pas__. __Je ne comprends pas__. _

_Desolé, Madame. Desolé, Monsieur. Desolé, desolé, desolé…_

Every second of it was time he'd never get back, but when he looked up again, he found that, by some act of divine intervention, he had done it. He'd got it under control.

And as his breathing slowed to a less life-threatening rate and evened itself out, Roxas became aware of Axel's palm, which had never left him, still stroking his back in slow, soothing circles. His thin face was still and supernaturally grave, cemented into an expression halfway between worry and relief, paler than Roxas had ever known his skin to be capable of being. But Axel's eyes were green again, as he'd always remembered them, and even though they seemed to be boring a hole into Roxas, he found that he was grateful for the anchorage.

He tried not to think about the fact that for the second time that night, Axel had had to come to get him, and had _got_ him, though in about a minute he would probably realize that it was only natural given that Roxas had passed out (twice) on his watch, and then not hours later had proceeded to have a mental breakdown in Axel's _bedroom_.

But then he remembered the reason, remembered his father's voice, all tinny and strange on the phone, and made a spirited effort to bolt from his seat, which almost caused his wobbling legs to send him crashing face-first into the coffee table.

"Slow down there, Rox," Axel said carefully, a firm hand coming to rest on his shoulder, urging him back down onto the futon with surprising gentleness—and in gentleness, his touch was almost unrecognizable. "You're not going anywhere until you can walk two feet without hurting yourself."

"Can't," Roxas slurred, struggling around his swollen tongue. "No time. I have to—I have to go."

Axel stared at him in confusion. "What's the rush? You were having a fucking seizure or something a minute ago, at least let me get you a bottle of water first—"

"NO!" Roxas yelled, suddenly finding control of his voice again. "I have no fucking time, I have to go RIGHT NOW."

"Go where, for fuck's sake? It's four in the morning!"

"Albany," Roxas replied, and knew he sounded six kinds of insane. "I need to go to Albany. Nam—my sister is in the hospital and my dad left me a message which I didn't get until just now and then my phone went and fucking died and… I just need to GO, okay? I need to go."

It took a moment for Axel to process this crazed babbling, and then he made a face like one who was trying _really_ hard to maintain patience. "Like I said, it's _four in the morning_. The first train out of Amherst won't leave until at least 9 o'clock, so unless you plan to walk or hitchhike—neither of which ideas I'm strongly advocating—you're just gonna have to keep it cool and wait for morning, alright?"

"You—you don't understand." Roxas could feel the blind panic flare up within him again, building and rioting agonizingly behind his eyes, and then he was getting all up in Axel's face while simultaneously trying to wrench himself free, screaming in an increasingly hoarse voice the only mantra he found the words to shape, "No! I need to go! I need to go _now_, let go of me, I—" until Axel's hand slapped over his mouth and forced him to look up into Axel's feverish eyes.

"Okay! Okay, fine then! Just stop it already!"

Roxas blinked, pulling at the hand clamped over his lips. "You—what did you say?"

"I said okay," Axel said firmly. "You want to go to Albany, so we're going to go to fucking Albany, alright? Just don't go all panicky and frothing again, shit, you had me scared to death back there. We're going to Albany, you hear me? But first I need to—oh fuck, I can't leave you here alone. I can't—ZEXION!"

Roxas almost jumped out of his jeans, at the same time that he heard a door clicking open, and Axel's roommate stepped into the room. Zexion's blue hair was mussed and he was dressed in sweatpants and a white t-shirt that said ENTROPY HAPPENS, but his face was calm, _awake_, like he had been standing at the ready behind the door, and Roxas was T-boned by the reality that even if the world seemed like his personal worst nightmare right now, this was still other people's life. Which he had disrupted.

"What is it?" Zexion asked, glancing briefly in Roxas's direction before directing his gaze fully at Axel. Roxas was eternally grateful for the gesture.

"I need you to watch Roxas," Axel said, surreally polite, but in a tone that brooked no argument. "He had a panic attack just now, and I don't think he's doing so well, but I just need twenty—no, fifteen minutes. I need fifteen minutes to go get something, and in that time, I need someone to sit with him."

"No problem," Zexion answered casually, completely unfazed, like this kind of crap happened to him all the time. "Just go."

It was possible that whatever harebrained scheme currently zipping through his head was making Axel's distracted, because Roxas suddenly felt long fingers cupping his left cheek softly, lingering, the kind of touching that under normal circumstances he wasn't sure he would allow. Then the fingers were gone, and just like that, he was staring at the back of Axel's head as he rushed out of the room.

o0o

"Hey," someone was saying. It took Roxas a whole thirty seconds to process who had said that, and he looked up to find a bottle of Poland Spring being offered to him. Zexion's eyes were a very dark blue, almost opaque in the soft light of the room, and Roxas stared at them stupidly for a moment before he forced himself to take the bottle and mumble an awkward, "Thanks."

"You're welcome," Zexion said quietly. "Try to drink a few gulps, it'll make you feel better." He paused, and went on conversationally, "Anxiety attacks can lead to dehydration," like he was presenting his thesis to a panel of experts. "It might also be a good idea to pour some on your hands and splash it on your face and neck. I can get you a hand towel if you want."

"I think I'm fine," Roxas said weakly, but followed the proffered instructions to the letter, and weirdly, found that he _did_ feel better, which said something about the benefits of possessing a scientific mind.

Zexion continued to watch him without saying a word, but his gaze was mild and not at all discomfiting, its unnerving ability suppressed for the time being. Nevertheless, the lengthening silence was starting to make Roxas edgy, and apparently Zexion could sense this because he motioned toward the door and said, "Perhaps it would be better if you got some fresh air. If you want, we could sit out on the front steps and wait for Axel there."

Roxas couldn't think of anything better, so he nodded docilely, and followed Zexion out into the hall, into the cool night air. He sat down on the concrete steps leading down to the pavement, and rubbed his face wearily, trying hard not to slip over the edge. When he opened his eyes, Zexion had settled into a standing position, leaning loosely against the doorway—like he wanted to ensure that he'd have the higher ground should Roxas decide to try anything psychotic and suicidal. His eyes were no longer on Roxas, but settled on some indistinct object far off in the distance.

"You know, I met Axel for the first time the day after he burned all of your research notes," Roxas found himself saying, possibly out of _insanity_, but more likely because he was restless and his thoughts were crowding his head and the silence—the hugeness of all that had happened, that was still possibly going on—scared him shitless.

He straightened his spine, fisted his hands over his knees tightly, and continued, "Demyx told me about it. I'm sorry that your work was put on hold because of it."

"Why should you be sorry?" Zexion asked, still not looking directly at Roxas. "You didn't even know Axel then."

He turned, and regarded Roxas with a mild look, and—unbelievably—cracked into a small smile. "Not that I'm implying you should be apologizing for him _now_." The smile deepened into an amused curve. "Don't tell Axel, but I always have backup files for all my research. I think you'll agree that it's better for the good of society if Axel maintains the delusion that his presence is eternal torment to everyone around him."

It was hard enough coming to grip with the fact that he was _not_ going to die of chest constrictions in a college dorm room and end up in the newspaper as some kind of cautionary tale, hard enough without this surreal discovery of Zexion's hitherto unknown sense of humor. Although—considering the shoes comment from earlier—Roxas supposed this revelation didn't come as a _complete_ surprise.

Then he thought of something else. "If you weren't busy catching up on your research tonight," he began, hoping he didn't come off as a nosy idiot, "then why didn't you come to Demyx's party?"

At this point, Roxas decided he might as well lose his mind now, the universe was so bizarre, because Zexion had spun his head away abruptly and his shoulders had slumped into a slouch and he had said, "It's not really my kind of scene," in a voice that might seem normal on anyone else but in Zexion's case was clearly indicative of deep discomfort—possibly even _embarrassment_.

_He's just human_, Roxas reminded himself, trying not to be _too_ floored by the realization. _He's not a killer robot, just a very smart person with possibly anti-social tendencies. Larxene was just full of shit._

"Demyx understands," Zexion went on, seemingly unaware of Roxas's disturbed state. "And he'll be able to tell you that himself in a moment if Axel doesn't crash that car trying to parallel park."

"What?" Roxas boggled, but was interrupted by the sound of shrieking tires, as a sleek Aston Martin screeched to a halting stop right in front of him, sending a small breeze ruffling through Roxas's hair. He spent exactly three seconds staring at the way the silver hood gleamed expensively in the streetlight, before the side doors of the car sprung open and two people came spilling out. One of them was Axel, and the other was indeed Demyx, and they were caught in what was obviously an ongoing dispute.

"Goddamn it, Demyx, I already told you that I would never ask if it weren't important," Axel roared as he slammed the door shut with enough force to be considered _abusive_, given the _incandescent beauty_ of the vehicle. "Stop being such a stingy bastard, it's not like I'm stealing your car!"

"Fuck no, you asshole!" Demyx screamed back, clearly livid. "I put up with a lot of your crap but if you think I'm about to let you jack my baby God knows where in the middle of the fucking night, you'd better think again, fucker, because in—"

"Demyx," Zexion said, raising his voice to be heard over the din of the argument. All traces of awkwardness had vanished from his person. "I know it's not my place to ask, but just this once, maybe you could humor Axel. It really is important to him."

Demyx jerked his head up, as if noticing their presence for the first time. His eyes flickered from Zexion to Roxas, and Roxas didn't know what was showing on his face, what evidence of severe tragedy, but it made Demyx blink rapidly and nod, as if in swift understanding, so Roxas had to reaffirm his conclusion that this guy couldn't possibly be as dim as he purported to convey. Quickly, the belligerent expression on Demyx's face dissolved into a friendly, slightly besotted smile, as he seemed to gravitate toward Zexion while still darting searching glances at Roxas out of the corner of his eye.

Roxas thought about cracking a whipped boyfriend joke, but Naminé was in the fucking hospital and he was still fighting off the pawing, insidious fingers of an anxiety attack, so he didn't, just mentally conjugated French verbs and monitored his own breathing in an effort to stay on his feet. _If anything happens to her_, he thought, shutting his eyes tightly as though to drive out the suddenly nightmarish possibilities. _Please, God, even you couldn't possibly be this much of an asshole. I don't have very much left, please don't take any more from me. Please._

"Do you know where you're going?" Demyx was saying somewhere to his left, barely above a whisper and perhaps a bit contrite. "If you have an address, you can just feed it into the GPS and it'll tell you exactly how to get there."

"I know that," Axel bit out irritably. "I can work a fucking GPS, okay, except—where in Albany are we going exactly? Roxas?"

"The hospital," Roxas mumbled, still with his eyes closed. "It's called," he began, trying to call up memories of his (one) visit to Naminé's shithole of an art school, the tour of the city that he had nearly slept through, "Albany Medical Center. Her school's affiliated with it or something, I'm pretty sure that's where they would put her." He thought about his baby sister, thin and pale and birdlike, ash-colored, being shuffled away in the hands of strangers. She was somewhere out there in the night, far out of his reach, and the need to go to her burned through him like a corrosive substance.

"Good enough for me," Axel said, and Roxas opened his eyes when he felt Axel's hand descend on his shoulder. "Let's go, Roxas. I promise to get you there before the first train even leaves Amherst Station."

Somehow, it wasn't difficult to believe that.

"Do you want me to come along?" Demyx asked earnestly. "I'm not trying to be a selfish jerk," although the way he slanted a concerned look at his Aston proved maybe there was _some_ element of selfishness involved, "but it's a very long drive and Roxas, you seriously don't look so good. I'm not sure about letting Axel take the wheel the entire way. What if something happens, or he falls asleep…"

"What are you trying to say?" Axel said, in an affronted voice that meant he was simply aghast by this implication that people might find him to be somewhat of an undependable flake.

"I don't think that'll be necessary," Zexion interjected, emerging from within the dormitory. Roxas hadn't even been aware that he had gone inside. "But just for insurance, hold on to this," he said, and tossed something heavy and metallic to Axel, who caught it easily. Roxas saw that the object was a tall can of what appeared to be energy drink.

"Where the hell did you get this?" Axel sputtered. "I thought you trashed my entire stash! I had to drive to Mexico to buy this shit, it's not FDA-approved."

"Perhaps I'd held on to one or two, in case I had to pull an all-nighter," Zexion said innocently. "I just thought it'd make you think twice before tampering with my research notes in the future." Roxas thought he saw a conspiratorial glance flicked at him, but he couldn't be sure.

"Sweet!" Axel crooned, smiling his crazy, crazy smile. "We definitely got nothing to worry about now."

He pulled open the door on the passenger's side and beckoned to Roxas. "Come on, let's get going already. If we want to make good on that promise, better start burning rubber."

Gratitude surged up inside Roxas, powerful and sudden and enormous. He turned to Zexion and Demyx, now standing side by side on the steps, almost shoulder to shoulder, and the words of thanks that stumbled out of his mouth were almost slurred into incoherency. "Thank you, you two," he managed with inhuman effort. "Really, thanks for everything. I don't know what I would have done if it weren't for you."

"Good luck," Demyx said, waving slowly, while Zexion just nodded in silent acknowledgment.

Then Roxas was climbing into the expensive leather interior of Demyx's car, and Axel was beside him in an instant, turning the key in the ignition. "Be sure to buckle up," he warned ominously.

Later, as Roxas watched in silent horror as Axel did forty-five on several turns and courted fiery, wrecking death with each reckless spin of the Aston's steering wheel, he had just enough presence of mind to notice that, in his haste to get out the door, Axel had likely stuffed his feet into the first pair of shoes that he could think of—the beat-up, oversized, classic hi-top Converse in Kelly Green.

- - -

**TBC**

**

* * *

Moar A/N: **I'm so sorry that my writing has been so emo of late. Anymore of this shit and I too will have to make good on that hara-kiri threat. Honestly, writing this chapter was like pulling teeth. Ten guesses as to why! Okay, it was really because I was suffering from a case of seasonal Bizarro Fangirl Syndrome, wherein I suddenly and irrationally hate and denounce every pairing/character I previously liked. _358/2 Days_ didn't help, there was no way I could go back into Roxas's head when his canon self was so boring and bland and Zzzzz. It was all I could do to refrain from immaturely retconning Roxas's ex-girlfriend in this fic into Xion (though those descriptions sound a bit familiar, don't you think?).

To ice this cake of suck and fail, my chapters are getting tragically longer; at this rate the last one won't even fit into one document. (But I am already working on the next one! Goal is to wrap up by Christmas! -- hopeless)


	11. Interlude

**My Girlfriend, Who Lives In Canada: Extra**

-x-

INTERLUDE: CONVERSATIONS ON I-90

written by

Quillslinger

-x-

Exterior. Night. Establishing shot of a silver car speeding down the highway in a torrential downpour, the bright light of the highbeams glistening on the wet road ahead. Inside the car, the radio is on, the volume turned down low, "Miles Behind Me" by Hotel Lights playing softly.

-x-

"Rox. You awake?"

"Am now. What's up?"

"Sorry, didn't mean to wake you. Quiet was getting to me."

"Don't worry about it. Wow, it's really pouring out there, huh?"

"Yeah. Visibility's completely shit. Hey man, you mind if I light up? Driving always puts me a little on edge."

"So I gather that patch thing's not working out for you?"

"No kidding. Those things are nasty as fuck, and I can't stand the taste of nicotine gum. It's just not meant to be."

"What a tragedy."

"Do you mind or not, yes or no?"

"Not at all. Do you even have any cigarettes on you?"

"No, but Demyx always keeps some in his glove compartment. Let's see now—bingo!"

"Are those… pink?"

"…apparently. _Sobranie__ Cocktails?_ Seriously, who does he think he is, Elizabeth Taylor?"

"Don't worry, I'm sure pink cancer sticks are cancer sticks all the same. So, what's the ETA? Where are we?"

"Just got off I-91. Should be about three hours—two and a half until we get there, but I'm practically blind and down to a crawl in this rain. These wipers are fucking useless."

"No, no, this is plenty fast. Really just… I don't want to get swiped into a tree or anything."

"And _I_ do? Just sit tight, smartass, I'll get you there in one piece. So… what did you and the Zexster talk about while I was out?"

"Nothing much. Mostly about what an absolute terror you are to live with."

"He's full of lies. It's not like he's a ray of rainbow and sunshine to be around either, so."

"Whatever. Look, don't you think that's kind of uncalled for? He's an alright guy. You probably just hate him because he's dating your ex."

"My what? My who?"

"Never mind…"

-x-

"Any luck with the phone?"

"No. My dad's not picking up, neither's Naminé, and I think there's something wrong with the reception. Must be bad coverage in this area or something, I'm barely getting a bar."

"Well, it was worth a try."

"Yeah, you're right. Thanks for lending me your phone."

"Very welcome."

"Axel?"

"What?"

"I'm really sorry."

"For?"

"For… making you do this, I guess. I was kind of deranged. This whole thing is insane."

"If it's important to you, it's worth it. Don't apologize."

"It's just… the more I think about it, the more this seems like a stupid idea."

"Too late to turn around now."

"God. I'm such a fuck-up. I'm such a fuck-up I _redefine_ the word."

"No more than anybody else, really…"

"Are you serious?"

"Like a heart attack. No offense, Roxas, but you're like, what, seventeen? I'm not trying to be condescending here, but in terms of life experience, you're practically a baby."

"Yeah, you're right. That wasn't demeaning or condescending _at all_."

"Well suck it up, 'cause it's true. You have your tiny core of rage right now, and you think it's never gonna stop hurting, never gonna go away, but you've still got a lot of time, and a ton of other stuff going for you. I know it's hard to see it like that when you're standing knee deep in shit, but you're just going to have to believe that everything is going to work out, okay? "

"Thanks for the sentiment, but you don't actually know that."

"Possibly not. But okay, try this on for size. On the night _I_ turned seventeen, I weighed like ten pounds, and had about two dollars to my name. In _Canadian money_. I was running on about five kilos of nose candy, and oh, right, there was also the slight, inconsequential little detail of me being sort of passed out on the side of the road in a puddle of barf next to the car I'd just finished crashing into a ditch."

"…the fuck?"

"I know, right? But, here I am, substance-free, calmly and competently behind the wheel and not doing too shabby if I do say so myself. Hell, I even have a savings account. I think that says a lot about the human capacity for evolving from a state of being a total fuck-up, if nothing else."

"You mean because your life right now is just so spectacularly together?"

"Yeah, it kind of is. I got nothing to complain about, and even if I did, I know I'd just have to weather it out. Things don't look so bad taken in some kind of perspective. All you need is the right frame of reference, you know? There's really nothing you can't get over, given enough time, effort, and good scotch."

"Not everything. Some things are just... I don't think you can make up your mind to get over them just like that. Some things you just can't come back from. Like, my sister—she's half of all I've got left."

"Maybe... But you're still going to have to try, you know? When the time comes, you'll know what you have to do. For now, stop being such a fucking basket case about it. You don't even know what's going on, and you'll find out soon enough, so don't kill yourself over things you can't do anything about."

"It's the waiting. That's the hardest part. I just… I can't just sit here in this car and wait. I've had enough of it—I'm sick of just waiting around for something to happen, or for the universe to screw me over again."

"I know how you feel—no, believe me, I do. But waiting is all you can do for now. So just focus on that, and leave out all the other stuff."

"Has anyone ever told you that undergraduate psychology is extremely annoying?"

"Go fuck yourself."

-x-

"That book you gave me—it really belonged to your mother?"

"_The Cunning Man_? Yeah. Yeah, it was hers."

"So why'd you give it to me?"

"Because it's a good read. Because it's about Toronto. Because Robertson Davies was a _man's_ man, and because I thought a book would make a better gift than coffee or sushi for a change. What do you want me to say?"

"Addie… Was that her name?"

"You got it. Short for Adeleine."

"Sorry. You sound like you don't want to talk about this."

"It's not a problem or anything. I just don't remember much about her."

"But you said you were ten when…"

"I was ten when she died, sure, but even before that, I didn't know much about her. She left when I was about a year old."

"Oh."

"Not her fault. See, when I was born—I was kind of a sick baby. I was born with half my heart sticking out of my chest."

"_Jesus_."

"Yeah. Show you the scar sometime. So, there was all this stuff with surgery and prolonged treatment and therapy. It was pretty rough on my mother, and she wasn't in any shape to deal with any of it. Postpartum depression. It was pretty bad. So after about a year, she moved back across the country with her parents, and all in all I only saw her about three or four times after that, so when I say I don't remember much, I _mean_ I don't remember much."

"How did she die—if you don't mind me asking?"

"No, I don't mind. She committed suicide. Shot herself, according to my grandparents. My father didn't even let me go to the funeral."

"That's awful."

"That's my old man. Why'd you think I ran away to Vancouver when I was sixteen?"

"You ran away? What'd you do in Vancouver?"

"What do you _think_ people run away for? Be a rebel. Experiment with my sexuality. Get stoned out of my mind. Shoot up in public restrooms, sleep in alleyways, crash Volvos I don't own into ditches."

"Is even half of that true?"

"What does it matter? _Enough_ of it is true for it not to be okay."

"I thought you were all about doing things for the sake of the stories to tell after."

"I am. But those aren't the stories I want to tell. They're not interesting."

"If you say so."

"I know so. There's being into new experiences, and then there's blowing your dealers and shooting heroin into your eyeball. Not the same thing, not even remotely on the same plane of existence."

"You shot heroin into your eyeball?"

"No, fucker, I'm making a point. The point is those stories aren't interesting because they're all the same, and they all involve the same kind of people and the same kind of mess, and they all end the same way, except when they don't. This one didn't."

"Alright, so… fast forward a few years. How'd you manage to get into college?"

"How else—and don't think I didn't catch that note of sarcasm, smartass. Cleaned up my act, detoxed, got a job—more like _ten_—and got my GED. Took a shit ton of all-nighters and correspondent courses, but I did it. SATs in the 90th percentile, sweetheart."

"You make it all sound like cakewalk."

"Yeah? Well, it wasn't. Funny how stuff never sounds as harrowing as the real thing when you're just telling it, huh? Anyway, you know the rest. I immigrated, moved east, started going to school here. Met you. And let me tell you, I am hella glad _that's_ the order everything went down in, because trust me on this, you would _not_ have wanted to meet me when I was seventeen. Or eighteen. Or--"

"Yeah, yeah, I get the point. I'm just going to take this opportunity to say that you wouldn't have liked me very much at the age of thirteen either, so."

"You mean you were even _more_ of a little shit back then than you are now? Holy shit, Rox, you're blowing my mind."

"Blow this, you sexual predator."

"I think that's what they call sending a mixed message."

"Like you should talk. You're the master of confusing signals."

"I hate it when you talk."

"Very mature. How old did you say you were again?"

"Old. Older than you—old enough for it to be an issue. Definitely old enough to know better."

"Well, do you?"

"What?"

"Know better. Do you know better, being so old and wise?"

"Can't tell you. I'm still waiting to find out myself."

-x-

"Okay, my turn. Can I just say something?

"Be my guest. I tell you something, you tell me something."

"It's kind of long and complicated. I'll try to explain it the best I can. So you know those stupid romantic comedies that like to pretend they're deep—Garden State is actually a pretty good example—where the protagonist is always this young, sensitive guy with a shitload of issues who hates life and finds no meaning in his mortal existence?"

"Jeez, does that sound like someone _we_ know?"

"I'm _getting_ to that. Anyway, this idiot meanders around bemoaning his fate to a sad, sentimental indie soundtrack for about twenty minutes, then somewhere near the end of the first arc he runs into a twee, quirky, shitastically awesome girl in some kind of clichéd meet-cute, who then proceeds to teach Clueless Emo Moron all about life and the wondrous wonders of living and all his twisty issues magically vamoose, just like that. You know what I'm talking about?"

"Uh uh. You're losing me, man."

"There's actually a name for this type of character. I read it online somewhere. What'd they call it—that website that tells you everything there is to know about fiction?"

"Oh god, you read TV Tropes too? I think I nearly went into systemic failure when someone sent me the link. I was glued to the computer for, like, a _week_. But yeah, I think I know what you're talking about now. It's whatchamacallit… the Manic Pixie Dream Girl?"

"Yeah, that's it!"

"Okay, so… Wait… Are you implying that…?"

"Um…"

"What the _fuck_, man?"

"Hold on, there's more to it! This story's a little different. Let's try this again. There's this guy, and there's this girl, right, but here's the twist: way _before_ Dream Girl ever even enters the picture, there was this _other _girl—well, in this case, it would be this other _guy_."

"You don't say. And let me guess. He's older? Dark-haired?"

"Yes… wait, how do you know all that?"

"There's always some older, dark-haired guy hidden in everyone's past. So, this guy, did he get you drunk? Slip something into the drink that made you all dizzy and loose? Pet your hair and tell you you're pretty, oh so pretty, and he'd make you feel so good?"

"No! No, of course not. Did—did that happen to you?"

"Cool your jets. I'm just hypothesizing. Got to cover all the bases, y'know?"

"…sure. Anyway, the moral of this entirely incoherent and slightly rambling story I'm trying to tell is… well."

"That life is messy and unscripted? A stage on which we all perform?"

"Sorry, Professor Bloom, but I don't have any pithy one-liner that would adequately encapsulate the gooey emotional essence of this situation."

"Hah, prospective English major my _ass_. Say, you're not gonna turn into one of those pretentious douchebags a few years down the line, are you? You know those guys that wear black turtlenecks with Fidel Castro hats and lounge around in coffeehouses and tell you they're 'working on my novel'?"

"Not likely. I look like shit in hats. But back to the point: in _this_ story, the Dream Girl _doesn't_ manage to fix the protagonist, and there are many reasons for that but at least half of them have to do with… with the one that came before. The one in the protagonist's past. That's the main reason it just won't work out."

"You're very sure about this, huh?"

"No, Axel, I—I'm just saying it's not a good idea to get your hopes up. When you set your expectations of something too high, the real thing is likely to disappoint. But it's okay. I don't do that anymore."

"Maybe you're wrong. Maybe you should try again."

"You—there you go again. You do these things and just—you rebuff all my efforts to categorize you, and that freaks me out. You're certifiable and raving a mile a minute half the times, but for some reason—_despite_ all logical reasons, I don't hate it. God, I don't. I don't hate you."

"Coming from you, that's almost heart-warming."

"I'm just trying to make you understand. You're not that person for me. Or it's more like, you _can't_ be. That's what I came to realize tonight."

"Shit. Well, honestly, Roxas? I've never really thought of myself as _that person_ to begin with, whatever that means, and outside of sappy movies, I don't think that person really exists for anyone. I was just trying to… you know."

"To get yours?"

"Something along those lines. Doesn't sound too good when you put it like _that_, but… it is what it is. I can't lie and put a pretty label on it."

"Doesn't sound all that bad to me."

"Roxas. Do you _want_ me to be that person for you?"

"No. No, I want you to be _you_. I want—for this to be less fucked up, and to make a heck of a lot more sense than it currently does. I want everything to work out, like you said—but that's just it, isn't it? You can't be the magic fixer for me because it just doesn't work like that. Even 'rocks fall everyone dies' is more credible."

"No shit."

"So. I just don't know. Where does that leave us?"

"Good question. Where _does_ that leave us."

"I don't know."

"Hey, I know one thing. Did you or did you not call me your best friend?"

"I—oh, you mean _back then_. Yes. That is what I said."

"So I'm gonna tell you something, as your newly appointed best friend. I know you have a lot on your plate right now, and I even kinda get what you say about the whole magic fixer girlfriend thing… er, maybe. But whatever, even if all that's true, it doesn't mean you can't let other people help you out a little every once in awhile."

"How do you mean?"

"You don't have to be so hard on yourself all the time, is what I'm saying, and… you don't have worry about me causing you additional trouble, or anything else right now. So there's no need to explain—you don't owe me anything, okay? Whatever I choose to do, or _not_ do, that's my own decision, and if any of it bugs you, you just tell me and—and I'll back off. I swear. Just say the word."

"…I really don't know what to say to that."

"Say 'Yes, Axel.' 'Your vast wisdom has shown me the glorious way of truth, Axel. You're a mad genius, it's all so clear to me now, I can't believe my feeble inferior mind never saw it before.' Because that's how it's going to be from here on out. I'm calling it the Best Friend Clause."

"Like 'Axel Knows Best'?"

"Even better."

"You are just so modest, it blows my mind."

"Shut your whore mouth. And let me concentrate on the road for a minute here. There's, like, fucking zero visibility in this rain, and the dampness's making my old shoulder injury act up."

"Oh let me guess, there's probably some kind of story behind that."

"There is, but it's pretty boring. It involves a trout, a lawnmower, and Jim Morrison."

"Of course it does."

"You want a real story? I got one for you. Listen."

-x-

"So there's this guy. Guy's an asshole, we'll call him A. He meets this other guy. Other guy's kind of vertically challenged, it's not his fault he got the short end of the stick maybe literally but life's unfair like that, whatcha you gonna do? Basically, he's a runt. We'll call him R."

"A meets R. It's a total disaster. They're complete opposites. One's an adventurous risk-taker, the other's a shy, fretful little gnome. They butt heads, they cross each other, they can't agree on anything that means anything. Sharp words, errant fists. Everything in life seems hell-bent on pulling them in opposite directions. A goes left; R goes right. A says yes; R says no. A says stop and R says go go go. The more A pulls himself together, the more R starts to unravel like an old sweater. They're practically strapped down to a rollercoaster ride headed for catastrophe."

"But somewhere in the middle of all that, there's adventure. If this were a movie, this part would be like a montage, all blurred out actions and artistic freeze-frames, set to an awesome classic rock soundtrack and not that milquetoast indie bullshit all you kids are listening too. Late spring gives way to early summer: blue sky, green grass, crowded street. Cut to A swerving a sharp corner, head tossed in laughter at some stupid thing R said. Cut to R's lopsided frown as he faces down a platter of sashimi. Cut to R's awkward little smile (he thinks A's not looking). There's a ridiculous, potentially life-threatening rhythm to their life, the way it's unpleasantly beautiful and lacks all common sense, but it's okay, because that's what makes it worth it. Yeah, that's what makes it worth it."

"Then, one day, A thinks about kissing R. No special reason, it starts out as this idle, unsubstantiated train of thought he entertains about R's weird freckled nose, the x or y number of occasions it's nearly brushed his own, and how easy, how terribly simple it would be just to lean over and bridge that immaterial gap and kiss him. He thinks about kissing R, but doesn't, so when he does, it's inevitably for the wrong reason. A fucks up. He does that a lot, but this time, he didn't mean to. He has to control the damage if he wants it to go somewhere. And yeah, he's worried. He worries he might ruin it all, but he's still got to try. That's just the kind of guy he is. Don't give up until you've given it all you got."

"What compounds the problem is the fact that A is spectacularly bad at reading R. He just has no fucking idea. He thinks—hopes—_thinks_ that R wants the same thing, but this is complicated by the fact that neither knows what shape that 'thing' is supposed to take. Neither has been here before. If R spooks, he runs. But A is not afraid. He refuses to be—and if R isn't afraid either, then everything is going to be okay. Everything is going to be okay."

"That's the story. The story of A and R. Make of it what you will. The ball's in your court."

"Fadeout."

-x-

"You wanna know something?"

"What?"

"That thing I said, about you being my best friend and that's the reason why this is not okay?"

"…what about it?"

"That… may not always be the case. I mean, about the whole it not being okay part."

"Hmm."

"But I wouldn't mind if… that is, I would understand if—if you just don't want to wait."

"Why don't you just let me decide that for myself, okay?"

"I—yeah. Yeah, okay."

-x-

The radio has gone silent, and as the camera zooms out, the voices peter and fade. In front of the blurred windshield, the night stretches deep into the horizon. They are still a long way from Albany.

-x-

FADEOUT

* * *

**A/N:** EVERY CHAPTER FROM NOW ON WILL BE LIKE THIS. Wait, I'm just kidding, where are you going?! So obviously this isn't Chapter 11. This this Fake Chapter 11. Chapter 10.5. Initially I was going to do this in script form for maximum cheapness/obnoxiousness, but FFN wouldn't accept screenplay format. Haters. Back to your regularly scheduled program next update. (A belated Happy New Year to everyone!)

One other thing I meant to do and forgot to was thank **Helicopters** for providing the information I needed to write this chapter. You know what I'm talking about. I took some liberties with reality in the end, but I still wouldn't have been able to do it without your help.


	12. Chapter XI

**Title:** My Girlfriend, Who Lives In Canada

**Pairings:** Axel/Roxas, Olette/Rai, SoRiKai, and Zemyx. For now.

**Disclaimer:** The Kingdom Hearts franchise and its characters do not belong to me.

**Summary:** Daddy issues, fake girlfriends, teenage drama. You know the drill.

**A/N: **After the byzantine novels that were Chapter 9 and 10, I've decided to scale back and try to force my prose to slim down a little. Results are dubious, but at least I won't bore you to death with my convoluted sentence structures anymore. I hope. Anyway, enjoy!

* * *

**XI.**

There was light coming from above, filtered a pale orange on the back of his eyelids, warm on his face. Roxas cracked his eyes open to a window full of sun, heavy and hot, streaming in from a moderate angle in the sky. Low for June. He tried to uncurl from the grotesque contortion his body had been forced into by the car seat, and every bone in his body screamed mutiny, like Roxas was an octogenarian instead of a lithe, nubile seventeen-year-old.

Rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, he yawned, and found that he was alone in the parked car. As usual, his mind jumped to the worst of possible conclusions, but before Roxas could properly hyperventilate and die of Panic Attack No. 2 in whatever remote horror-flick-setting neck of the wood he was convinced he'd been abandoned in, there was a sharp rap on the glass pane to his immediate right. Axel's face appeared in the boxed space, backlit against the bright morning glare. He mimed at Roxas to roll down the car window.

"Good morning, sunshine," Axel said, flashing his best and least trustworthy smile. "Bought you breakfast. Think you can keep it down?"

He handed Roxas a bottle of Gatorade, a packet of mint gum, and two bars of Fig Newton—God, breakfast of champions—and wandered off looking distinctly pleased with himself for this gesture of thoughtfulness. _My superhero_, Roxas thought sarcastically, and then recalled with chagrin that he had barred himself from this possibility.

Just as well. Axel was really more Peter Pan than Superman anyway, and Roxas didn't have the colorings to pull off Lois Lane. Then again, if he wanted to be Wendy Darling he'd also damn well better get it together soon lest some Tiger Lily came along and snatched his hero up, and what had he ever done to the universe to deserve a mind that spun these kinds of traumatizing analogies?

He checked his watch. 7:53 am. Axel had kept his promise, so Roxas had to give him brownie points for that, at least.

When he glanced over, Axel had crawled back into the driver's seat with a Red Bull clutched in a death grip—one of these days he was evidently going to die an ignoble death of caffeine and taurine poisoning. "Alright," he said, "so the GPS broke down mysteriously on the last leg of the trip, but the guy at the gas station told me downtown Albany is just down the road, and from there it should be easy enough to find the hospital."

Roxas just gave a dumb nod. The air between them felt heavy with the kind of customary awkwardness that came in the wake of conversations of the lengthy, soul-baring variety. Roxas had a sudden surreal realization that he had had more of those in the last three days than probably his entire life combined.

The rest of the drive was entirely silent. Trees melted into buildings as the road grew thick with cars, and Roxas spent his time counting stoplights, thinking about nothing at all. By the time they pulled up to the redbrick complex that made up Albany Medical Center, he had almost forgotten what they were even there for.

Almost.

Axel, as if sensing Roxas's growing edginess, closed a hand over his shoulder and shook Roxas lightly. "Just go in there and take care of your sister, alright? If you need me, I'll be…"

"Listening at the door?" Roxas asked. The smallest curl of a smile slipped into his voice, almost against his will.

Axel flipped him off. "In the _cafeteria_, asshole. Now piss off and go do whatever brotherly things you got to do. Don't make me turn this car around."

o0o

For some reason, Roxas kept expecting the receptionist at the desk in the lobby to bar him from visiting Naminé on grounds of his being a shitty, neglectful older brother. This did not happen, and before long, he was finding himself stepping out of the elevator and making his way down a long hallway on the third floor. He still didn't know what to think or how to feel, but he was there anyway, and it didn't matter.

Naminé, because she had a guilt-ridden father with deep and shadowy connections in the legal world, had a private room, the ugliness of which Roxas, if he had time, would gladly expound upon at length and with great passion. It depressed him a little to think that it had taken him that long to figure out that he was gay, when really, all the signs had always been kind of glaringly obvious.

But the point was that he had no time to deal with it now, because there was his sister propped up against the pillow on the narrow bed, preternaturally pale in the morning light coming in from the window. Made paler still by the drabness of her hospital gown. They were similar in build, had grown up inches within each other until Roxas's fourteenth birthday when his bones had woken up and remembered their job—but he had never seen her this thin and small, swallowed up in dreadful cotton sheets. Something slammed into the inside of his chest like a fist, almost doubling him over.

"What happened?" he asked, the words tripping out of his mouth. He lurched toward her bed, but stopped himself, because even though he wanted to pull his sister into his arms and never let go, he was also, paradoxically, afraid of touching her. "Are you okay? What—God, what did they say?"

His dad rose from the chair next to the bed—Roxas hadn't even noticed that he was there—and took a step toward him. He looked tired, deep lines around his puffy eyes. "Roxas, how'd you get here?"

"In a car," Roxas said vaguely, and did not meet his gaze. "_Well?_" he pressed, staring at Naminé, who exchanged a look with their father.

"I had an accident," she said at last. Voice small, and carefully modulated. "I fell down the stairs on my way to my art history exam yesterday, and passed out for a bit. My roommate found me, and called an ambulance." She gave him a nervous smile, and added, "I'm fine now, Roxas. _Really_."

"Oh," Roxas said. "Okay." His mind went completely blank as blind relief flooded in—but something still felt off, not quite right. "So if it was just a spill, why are you still in the hospital?"

Naminé directed another helpless look at their dad. It was all very mysterious and perplexing, and Roxas felt certain he was going to have an embolism if someone didn't let him know what was going on soon.

"The doctors wanted to keep her here overnight for observation," his dad said. There was something strained about his tone that Roxas couldn't seem to tear his mind away from. "And… there is something else."

"What?" he rasped. "What aren't you telling me?"

Naminé took a deep breath, and launched into speech. "They ran a couple of tests when I was admitted and they think—Roxas, please don't freak out about this—they think that I may have multiple sclerosis."

Roxas stared at her for a moment. His brain ran a self-scan, came up empty. "Is that the disease where you get brain damage?" he extrapolated.

A funny wobble pulled at the corner of Naminé's mouth, and Roxas could swear he saw his father wince, but neither of them chose to comment on his terminal dimness. Sometimes Pence and/or Olette would tell Roxas that his Darwin-fodder-level of unawareness when it came to how the real world worked would get him struck down by the hand of natural selection one day, but Roxas knew they were just jealous of his artistic soul and made a routine out of ignoring those haters.

"It's not exactly like that," Naminé said leniently. "And there's no definite prognosis yet, but I'll have to be more careful from now on. That's all."

_Well, at least MS isn't leukemia_, Roxas thought, and that was when all the plastered-up walls inside him crumbled and the fear came charging through, bubbling up his throat like boiling water. "There's no known cure for MS, is there?" he said in a tight voice. Not really a question, because Roxas _had_ read that particular Wikipedia article while procrastinating on one thing or other.

"No," his dad said. "But there is a treatment plan, and we'll do everything we can—"

"_Fuck_," Roxas cursed. He put his head in his hands, because the room was spinning and he was afraid he might fall down. "So that's it, isn't it? We get shit on all over again. _Goddamn it_."

Naminé turned her face away from him, her neck a graceful incline. "This is why we didn't want to tell you right away," she said quietly.

Roxas looked up. "What is that supposed to mean?"

"I knew you'd take it like this," Naminé said, still not looking at him. "You blow up, and then you shut down. Every time."

"When have I ever blown up at you?" Roxas said incredulously.

Naminé's head snapped around. "Last September," she said without missing a beat. "Dad went to a business dinner. You asked me why he wasn't home, I told you, and you kicked over a _chair_. Same month. Grandma and grandpa flew down for a visit, you locked yourself in your room for three days without saying a word to them. Thanksgiving…"

Roxas didn't even remember half of this shit, and part of it was because they had happened smack in the middle of that mostly hazy time period when he'd been slightly depressed and a lot more preoccupied with making out with his best friend in the back stacks of the school library. He had no idea that his sister had spent all this time making a goddamn catalogue of all his missteps to throw in his face, but of course since he was the rageful and neurotic one in the family, there had to be someone else to hold the passive-aggressive ball, didn't there?

"Are you finished?" Roxas said. He wanted to glare at her, and felt like an asshole, but did it anyway.

"Okay, you two," his dad said, stepping in between them a little. He was using his dispute management voice, the one reserved for cocktail parties and highly-charged divorce settlement meetings. "That's enough. Nam, this isn't helping anything. You're upsetting your brother."

"He needs to hear it, Dad," Naminé said, colors rising in her wan cheeks. "He _yelled_ at you last week."

"That was an isolated incident," said Roxas.

"What about all the other ones?" Naminé asked.

"I can explain those, too, if you'd stop giving me shit for like three minutes."

"If you don't start communicating with us, I'll…"

Roxas threw up his hands. "You'll what? You'll do what? Throw yourself down the stairs and end up in the emergency room again?"

Naminé just gave him this look like Roxas had just admitted to torturing puppies and kicking old ladies, and said, "It doesn't have to be horrible all the time, Roxas. It just doesn't have to be."

She sounded as though even saying this was hurting her, scraping deep out of her dark and terrible things that none of them had the courage to face. Roxas hated the feeling it created—being prone and helpless—so he decided to ignore it in favor of pitching a shitfit of righteous indignation.

(Sure, they were WASPs, but they were WASPs from _New York_. Overt emotions were allowed. Sometimes. In a private room. With the door closed.)

"Well, who is even _saying_ it does?" he found himself snapping. "Look, I don't know why you're blaming me for fighting with Dad, when _he's_ the one who's been running away from all our problems all this time."

His father jerked with surprise, like he'd been slapped square across the face. "Don't turn this around on me," he said crossly. "What problems are you talking about? We don't have any problems."

"Are you kidding?" Roxas said. "We are so dysfunctional we redefine the word. As a matter of fact, Merriam-Webster is revising all of their publications as we speak just to make amendments about our family's homegrown brand of crazy."

"I'd quit while I'm ahead if I were you, Roxas," said his dad, with an immiscible note of warning. "You're old enough to know how to start thinking before you speak."

"Roxas is right," Naminé said abruptly.

They both swiveled around to stare at her, and Roxas noted with spiteful glee the shocked and betrayed look that settled over his father's face. He had no idea where he had picked up this vindictive streak, but it was vaguely troubling.

"I'm sorry, Dad," Naminé said. "But I think you need to hear this, too." Her shoulders were quivering, palpably nervous, but Roxas recognized the determined expression solidifying on her face.

"Don't look at me like that," she went on, shaking her head. "I can't be on your side—and I can't be on his side. For once, I'd like somebody to be on _my_ side for a change."

"What are you saying, sweetheart?" Dad said carefully. "We're on your side, _of course_ we're on your side. No one is trying to make you feel—"

"She's dead," Naminé choked out, her voice breaking. "She's dead, and we were all there. Why can't we talk about it? I want to talk about it. About her."

Her eyes had that red-rimmed look about them that meant she was holding back probably a flood of wretched tears, and shit, Roxas had never known how to handle that. Neither had Dad. _Men shouldn't have to be subjected to this torture_, he thought, half crazed. _It should be prohibited by the Geneva Protocol or something_. Mom had always been the one to pull Nam's head into her bosom and stroke her bright hair and whisper soothing words into the red, miserable skin of her cheek, and they were helpless without her. Even thinking about it made nausea rise up in his stomach, made him clammy and sick as the grief sloughed off his skin.

"No," his father said, low and ragged, so that Roxas knew whatever he was feeling was mirrored inside his dad as well. "Please, just leave it alone, Naminé. We should talk about what we're going to do with your condition. I have to make arrangements, talk to your school, there're things to be done."

"Why would you rather talk to anyone else but me?" Naminé wailed. She was crying now, huge tears rolling down the contour of her cheeks. It horrified Roxas to watch, but he couldn't tear himself away—he blamed that for the tinge of sharpness materializing in the corners of his eyes.

"After Mom died," Naminé said, consonants watery and indistinct, "both of you disappeared. You each went into your own little world of grief, and I was just left standing there, holding the pieces of what used to be my father and brother. Do you have any idea how lonely it was? How lonely it _is?_" She wiped at her eyes ineffectually. "You were just _gone_, and even when you weren't, you were all wrapped up in each other's pain. You shut me out."

His dad just made this broken little noise in his throat, like all the scaffolding carefully constructed to hold up his life all this time had suddenly been dismantled. Take out one bolt, one screw, and it all came down. He stood in the white glare of the hospital room, all lines and hollowed eyes, working his large hands like he didn't know what to do with them. He was breathing in and out with effort, nails lodged in his lungs, and Roxas wondered what he himself looked like in this moment, whether the crushing guilt rolling up in his stomach was washing him out too, made him less tangible, emptied out from the inside. His face felt wet, and he couldn't understand why.

"Dad," Naminé said, tearful and imploring. "I am right here. We are your children and we are right here, and we need you to be here with us."

Dad stared at her for a moment, eyes in bright shards, unseeing. Then he whipped around and strode toward the exit. He stalled for a moment at the door, hand lingering on the knob, before flinging it open and disappearing into the hallway.

Intellectually, Roxas knew that he couldn't have stood there in catatonic silence for any more than a few seconds, but they felt like _years_. Then Naminé put her face in her hands and broke down into hopeless, heartbroken sobs, and that made his heart kick back into high gear, thudding and scared in his ribcage. He threw himself out the door, and upon seeing the empty corridor, ran into the stairwell. The top of his father's familiar gray head was about one flight below, and Roxas almost flung himself over the railings in his desperate adrenaline rush.

"Dad!" he yelled. "_Dad!_"

Unbelievably, that made his father stop in his track. Roxas could see, with obscene clarity, his fingers clenching tight over the iron railing, even the way the bones of his knuckles flexed and jumped. He was still mesmerized with it when his father spun around and practically raced up the stairs, taking them two at a time, blowing past Roxas like a speeding semi. He was out in the hall before Roxas even registered what was going on, and then he was in motion too, running after his dad back into Naminé's room, where Dad went right up to her and pulled her crumpled body into his arms, wrapping his bigger frame around his daughter in a protective shield, like he was trying to shut out the horrible world.

Roxas stumbled toward them, feeling stupidly desolate for a moment, but when he came within contact distance his dad just flung out one arm and reeled him in as well. His embrace was tight and hot and uncomfortable, and Roxas felt muffled, his tearstained face pressed into one of Naminé's bony shoulders, but he couldn't bring himself to care. His head was empty, a blank vista, and his heart was weightless with the sheer happiness of being allowed to feel like a child again, to be wrapped up in something warm, swallowing, and huge.

They stayed like that until there was a knock on the door, and the nurse came in to announce that it was time for Naminé's next round of tests.

o0o

"Do you think she's going to be okay?" Roxas asked.

His father gave him a tired smile. "Of course she will be," he said, and for a moment, the hideous fluorescent light in the hall left his face, erasing the deep lines that had stubbornly nested there. He was once more strong and smart and good and loving, and when Roxas looked up into his blue, blue eyes, he realized that his father wasn't going anywhere.

The thing was—the thing was that Roxas still couldn't take it all in just yet. He hadn't had enough time to process what had happened, how even though none of them had said a single thing that seemed to mean anything, his head was telling him that it was all going to be alright anyway.

Stranger still, he wasn't afraid of believing it.

"They're going to be at it for awhile," Dad was saying, a touch of impatience entering his voice. "Anyway, I've got to go make a few phone calls and get the rest of the paperwork done. I think I've found a new contender for the position of Most Incompetent Administrative Staff this side of the Atlantic ocean. Remind me to be nicer to the paralegals at the office from now on."

He paused, and looked down at Roxas with a quizzical expression. "You're going to be okay? Why didn't you call instead of trekking all the way up here?"

"My phone died," Roxas answered sheepishly. "Anyway, you know I _needed_ to be here."

His dad nodded. "So what are you going to do while we wait for her? Want to come along and help me wrangle the insurance vultures into submission?"

Roxas blanched in naked horror. "No thanks. I think I'd rather throw myself off a bridge." He gave his father a reassuring smile. "But I won't. I'll just be… in the cafeteria. Grab something to eat, maybe."

"That's good," Dad said, smiling back at him. The casual brush of his fingers through Roxas's hair as he walked past him down the hall said more than words could ever convey.

o0o

Exhaustion was catching up with him. As Roxas drifted through the busy hallways of the hospital, all the people and clamoring noise seemed to slow down, congealing silently around him like honey. His body felt light; he was floating above them all. Nothing could touch him now.

The hospital cafeteria was crowded, full of tired-looking doctors and nurses on their breakfast/brunch/lunch break, and distraught visitors who seemed equal parts worried and horrorstruck by the suspicious quality of the "food". Roxas cast his gaze around, and found Axel almost immediately, his red hair standing out like a blotch of oil paint on a background of mostly white and pastel blue. He was, predictably, holding a cup of coffee and making a face at it.

"Okay, I promise to stop making fun of the coffee at your workplace, because this shit is practically diesel fuel right here," Axel said the moment he saw Roxas. Then he took another look at Roxas's face, saw something there, and pasted on a more somber expression. "What happened?"

"Nothing," Roxas said. "Can we just," he jerked his thumb behind him vaguely, possibly in the direction of the door, "get out of here? Just for half an hour or something?"

Axel gave him a measuring look. "Sure," he said. "Wait out front. I'll bring the car around."

Traffic was light and downtown Albany had fuck-all to see, so they ended up just driving around for a good few hours, crisscrossing streets and intersections while listening to the (terrible) music streaming from the car radio and not saying much. Late afternoon snuck up on them while they weren't looking, and then the Hudson was glimmering with soft light to their left, nearly purple under the almost-setting sun.

Axel found an empty parking lot by the water, and pulled the car to a stop. Roxas climbed out of the car, and made for a park bench facing the river. Presently, Axel came to join him.

"Not much to see, is there?"

"Even if there were, I wouldn't be able to tell you," Roxas said honestly. "I was born and raised in the city, so I'm not supposed to acknowledge that other parts of New York exist."

"You little snob," Axel said with a chuckle. A suspicious scheming glint entered his eyes, scattershot. "You know, from here it's not that far to Canada. Wanna make a break for it? We could hit Niagara Falls by tonight, be in Toronto by tomorrow, what'd you say?"

"Doesn't sound too bad."

Axel raised his eyebrow. "Man, you're really out of it. You realize you just gave me verbal permission to kidnap you across the border? Fugitive status today, gay marriage certificate tomorrow."

"I always thought I would elope," Roxas said with a fluttering sigh. He put his hand over his heart. "End up an abandoned wastrel in some disreputable boarding house like a tragic Victorian heroine."

Axel sniggered. "Fucking drama queen."

"_English major_."

"Same difference." Axel waved his hand dismissively. "You're a real slick talker, but I bet you've never had to work for a living a day in your life."

Roxas colored slightly. "This is true," he admitted. "Maybe I was hoping you could impart some advice to me on that matter."

"What kind of advice you lookin' for?" said Axel. "I've held like a million different jobs."

"Which one was your favorite?"

"Never really thought about it. Maybe that time I was a fisherman in Newfoundland. Wait, I know! Being a poser."

"A _what_?"

Axel laughed again. "No, no, not a social poser. The other kind. You know, the kind that takes their clothes off."

"You mean an art model?"

"Yeah. Somehow I always preferred the other term."

Roxas turned and blinked, and it was as though he had never looked at Axel properly, had never registered the way the world grew so pale around him, the vividness of his coxcomb hair bleaching colors from his surroundings. He'd never exhibited much of an artistic drive when it came to anything that didn't involve the written words. Still, Roxas thought—if he could—he thought he might like to draw Axel.

"How come you had so many jobs?"

"Living costs money, Roxas, in case you didn't realize," Axel said, wrinkling his nose obnoxiously. "That, and I moved around a lot. After that one year in Vancouver, I never really stayed anywhere for more than half a year at a time. That's why I never bothered going back to high school. No stability."

"And how long were you moving around for?"

"Long enough. Never said I've stopped."

_He's going to leave_, Roxas thought irrationally, and then, _Don't go_. He mentally kicked himself.

When his voice recalled itself again, it had gained a bit of an edge. "You're probably just going to get all cryptic again so I don't know why I'm even bothering to ask, but—how old are you exactly?"

Axel grinned. Sheepish. "By the time I got to college, I was old enough to graduate. You do the math."

It was nothing short of mind-blowing how casual he was being about this whole thing, the way he had recited his astounding life story the previous night with almost clinical indifference. Roxas thought about that one chilling documentary on detoxification he'd been shown in middle school as part of some gang-prevention program, thought about looking for things he had never known he could have looked for. Things like track marks—ugly, bruise-colored bracelets attesting to the existence of another life—or perhaps a haunted dimness about the eyes, muting the vibrancy of life.

But Axel's inner arms were smooth and clean, the skin pale and deceptively unmarred under the rolled-up sleeves of his shirt, and his eyes were just as green, as bright and scatty as Roxas had ever known them to be. So perhaps there was something to be said about time's ability to erase the ghosts of past mistakes, and if so, maybe it was okay for Roxas to start believing that, too.

Yes, he wanted it—but more importantly, he wanted to not be _scared_ of wanting it.

With the dizzying intoxication of hope clouding his head, Roxas found himself staring at the blood-orange water in front of him, and thinking about the city that lay on the other side. His Gomorrah. It burned brightly in his thoughts, challenging him to look back and be turned to a pillar of salt. He had only attempted flying once in his life, and had immediately crashed and burned. Little wonder he was so terrified of getting back in the air.

There was no leaving New York.

"Hey, Roxas," Axel said, flashing him a shit-eating smile. "Bet you don't know why the sun sets red."

Roxas gave him a strange look. "Uh, sure I do," he said, blinking. "We covered the electromagnetic spectrum in sophomore year Physics."

Axel made a face, clearly deflated. "Man, it's just not the same when it's not done over text."

"I'm pretty sure I'd still have known the answer even if you'd texted the question," Roxas pointed out, and started to laugh. Axel punched him in the arm, _hard_, because he was _that kind_ of touchy motherfucker.

"I think I like this," Roxas said, a little breathless and not from the pain. "Yeah, I like this."

"Like what?"

"Being able to see in colors. I like it a lot."

Axel gave him an askance look, eyes wide and wary. "Alright, what the hell is going on? Are you sure everything's okay?"

"Yeah."

"Do you have any idea how weird you're being? It's freaking me out. It's like you're actually…"

"Actually what?"

"_Vulnerable_." He glanced sideways at Roxas, and quickly amended, "…or maybe just less prickly than usual. Which is _very_. Very, very."

It was strange to think that by merely lowering his own guards, he was somehow able to get Axel on the defensive. If he had known this from the start, Roxas reflected, perhaps their entire relationship would have unfolded a _lot_ differently.

Still, he had no regrets. Not for the things he had done, and not for what he was about to do.

Dipping his head, Roxas put his hand over his face. "I'm no good at this after all," he said, laughing ruefully. "I'm trying to tell you something, but I just keep fucking it up. I don't know how to do this."

"Do what?" Axel asked, cocking his eyebrow. "What are you doing?"

"Just… don't say anything for a minute."

Roxas could count, probably on one hand, the total number of times he had been reckless in all his life, so he knew for certain this was definitely one of those occasions. Axel's mouth tasted like horrible hospital coffee, and it mingled with the lingering bite of mint gum on Roxas's tongue; the skin at the back of his neck felt warm and soft, strands of coarse hair tickling the back of Roxas's hand. Roxas smirked, and took his time, biting Axel's lower lip just to be a little shit. It was good, maybe even better than the first time—it was the element of control that apparently made all the difference, and that thought made a jolt of shiver trill up his spine, like electricity.

When they parted again, Axel's eyes were wide and dark, long lashes fluttering rapidly. There was a bright sheen of moisture across his lips, gleaming in the sunlight, and Roxas found himself wishing he had one of those photographic memories, because seriously, this was too good for words.

"Are you sure?" Axel said. Almost uncertain. Voice pitched low.

"Sometimes I think so," Roxas said honestly, tilting his head. "And then sometimes it feels like I'm not sure at all. And maybe—maybe that's about as sure as I'll ever be capable of being." He felt laid-bare again, tossed into the open, shipwrecked on some rocky outcrop with nowhere to hide, but maybe that was just something he should learn to get used to from now on.

"I just thought I'd take your advice and make things a little easier for myself," he continued, chancing a smile. It didn't feel totally horrible, so he allowed it to deepen, fractionally, little by little. "Waiting is all fine and good, but you know, sometimes you have to think about the story you'll have to tell after, too. And…"

Sometimes, you just had to suck it up and go the extra mile.

"And I want this story. But if I want to know how it'll end, I'll have to give it a chance to get off the ground."

For a moment, Axel seemed at a loss for words—surely the universe would implode any second now.

Then he crossed his arms in front of his chest, and said, eyebrow arched, "Pretty big chance, considering _I'm_ the one being asked to take it."

"Let's say… I'm doing this because you bring me coffee?" Roxas tried feebly. It appeared his mile was coming up a few yards short. "Because you tried to quit smoking for me?"

Axel's expression turned tragic. "Yeah, about that. I'm sorry, Rox, but I don't think it's going to work out. For one thing the patch makes my skin itch in this weird way, and I can't stand the taste of nicotine gum, so I thought maybe we could re-negotiate this and work out, like, a rationing system or something, and—"

Roxas pressed his hand flat over Axel's mouth, something he'd been longing to do since about ten seconds after he'd met the guy. Then he realized there was a much better method to shut Axel up, and kissed him again, fast and sloppy and a little mean, grabbing his narrow face with both hands. He could feel Axel's breath, hot and light over his lips, and yeah, this felt right. This felt right.

"This is so unromantic," whined Axel, whose idea of a killer pickup line was probably: "My name is Kilgore, and you smell like napalm in the morning."

Roxas could feel the despair rising within him, and had to carefully untangle his hands from Axel's face because he wasn't sure he wouldn't start shaking him to death or something equally grisly. "There is… the sunset and everything," he said helplessly, laughter fighting its way up his throat in a surge. "I'd suggest holding hands and walking into it, but then we'd just fall into the river."

Axel rolled his eyes, fondly, and reached up with one hand to stroke the line of Roxas's cheek, light but incredibly focused, thumb dragging roughly over the skin. The part of Roxas that was victim to delusions of grandeur reared up and complained that this ending was so predictable and trite and that he should be ashamed for even allowing it to happen. He took great pleasure in telling it to shut the hell up. Sure, this story would never be the stuff of high literature, whatever the hell that even meant, but Roxas didn't mind. Predictable was okay. He'd had enough excitement and nasty surprises to last several lifetimes, and this—this had been a _long_ time coming.

In this particular story, Peter finally stopped running, and Wendy flew.

- - -

**TBC

* * *

**

**A/N: **Stick around! We're not done yet! And sorry this chapter took so long (again). I got sidetracked by incestuous ninjas ._.**  
**


	13. Chapter XII

**Title:** My Girlfriend, Who Lives In Canada

**Rating: **PG-13

**Disclaimer:** The Kingdom Hearts franchise and its characters do not belong to me.

**Summary:** It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single high school boy in possession of a good libido, must be in want of a girlfriend — or a pretend one.

**A/N:** Oh my God, I never thought I'd see this day...

* * *

**XII.**

Eventually, their Lifetime movie moment had to be interrupted when Roxas finally remembered that he had in fact promised his dad to be within easy reach. That had been a good couple of hours ago, so they hopped back into the car and drove faster than humanly possible—so you know, normal-Axel—back to the hospital. Roxas debated making Axel hide in the car, but then figured that if he was going to be keeping Axel around on anything like a regular basis, he might as well start easing his loved ones into it now before the crazy hit them in the face full-throttle.

So he brought Axel up to Naminé's room and made up some A-plus lies about meeting him at some college open-campus event, which miraculously seemed to work. It was lucky, he reflected, that Axel was still wearing his nice-if-wrinkled preppy ensemble from the night before. His hair alone was still questionable in spite of the ponytail's best effort, but that was hardly unusual for a college student. Even more astoundingly, Axel managed to turn on the charm Roxas hadn't previously known he possessed, and lay it on thick enough to smother any suspicions Roxas's father might have been harboring regarding the veracity of their account. Before Roxas knew it, they were discussing test scores and admission statistics, which would probably disturb him a lot should he dwell upon it for any length of time.

At one point, his sister did shoot him a slightly skeptical look, but considering the fact that their relationship was still on the rocks, Roxas figured she would be too cowed to ever call him on it.

It turned out that Naminé wouldn't be discharged for at least another day, so Roxas and his father fought the requisite battle over who got to stay with her, which Roxas ultimately lost when his dad pulled the Someone Has To Mind The House And Prepare For Her Arrival card. Roxas put up the token huffy protest, but in the end allowed himself to be packed into Demyx's car for the journey back. He loved his baby sister, but he also loved the idea of finally hitting the sack after the harrowing experiences of the last two days.

It was already dark when they strapped themselves down and prepared to leave. "How about some ambiance for the ride back?" Axel asked, popping a CD into the player.

Momentarily, the car was filled with the uneven beats of a song that Roxas realized, to his horror, might be _rap_. Axel seemed incredibly proud of his eclectic taste, bobbing his head along to the music while the inebriated-sounding singer rambled something about two zigzags and going down to the park to "smoke dat tumbleweeds".

"Where do you even _find_ these songs?" Roxas asked. "And does anyone actually drink the troll vomit that is Colt-45?"

"Oh?" said Axel, raising an eyebrow. "One college party, and he thinks he's a liquor expert."

"I just don't think you should be talking about music," Roxas said. "After all, your country is responsible for _Nickelback_."

"Don't even start," Axel said darkly. "Those losers would never have gotten half as popular if it hadn't been for the brain-dead suburban teens of this country eating up their shitty albums. That late 90s early 2000s period was basically a musical wasteland of popular grunge turds. Goddamn American emos."

"I don't know," Roxas mused. "I kind of liked Linkin Park."

Axel stared at him in unbridled horror. "_Dude_."

"No, seriously," Roxas said, smirking. "I think their lyrics are deep."

"That's it," Axel said as he threw the car into reverse and rolled out of the hospital parking lot—pedestrians scattering in panic, narrowly avoiding being pancaked under the wheels. "As soon as we're back in Amherst, I'm giving you a thorough cultural reeducation, and none of it will involve bad nu metal with unsubtle references to cutting."

He made a face at the steering wheel, and muttered, "Their lyrics are deep. _Jesus_."

o0o

Somewhere out on a particularly deserted stretch of I-90, Roxas almost had a heart attack.

"Oh _fuck_," he muttered, clawing his hand in his hair. "I _completely_ fucking forgot."

"What?" Axel said, eyes wide. "What's the problem now?"

Roxas turned to him with an expression he hoped was an appropriate medley of imploring and tragic. "I'm going to need to borrow your phone again." He paused, and added, "Also, would you mind making a little detour when we get back to Amherst?"

o0o

"Are you 100% sure about this? Because I'm okay with taking baby steps in the beginning—well, maybe not _baby_ steps. Teenager steps. Rated PG-13 for language and sexual situations."

Roxas resisted the very compelling urge to roll his eyes. "_Yes_, I'm sure. You sound like _you're_ the one who's about to shit himself."

"Oh please, you wuss." Axel made an unflattering snorting sound through his nose. "Don't lie and tell me you're not _this_ close to a full-on freak out sess. You didn't make a peep the entire drive up."

"If you're at all aware of the enormous potential for this to go horribly wrong, you wouldn't be shooting your mouth off right now," Roxas said, glaring out the car window. They were parked a block down from his school, and even from here he could make out the distinct soundtrack that customarily accompanied the merrymaking of hormones-driven teenagers finally allowed to cut loose for one night in the entire academic year.

"So you gonna send that text or what?" said Axel.

"Yeah, yeah."

Taking a bracing breath, Roxas pressed down on the 'Send' button his thumb had been hovering over for nearly fifteen minutes, and didn't exhale until he was certain the message had gone through. This was it. No going back now. He unhooked his seatbelt, praying to Jesus, Elvis, and Buddha that this venture would pay off and not go up like the Hindenburg, causing his entire life to fall apart around him. Again.

"Hey," Axel said just as Roxas was reaching for the door handle. "It'll be okay." He didn't sound quite as confident as usual, which Roxas realized was becoming something of a running theme. He probably shouldn't find that endearing, but did.

"Yeah," he said, and in what was clearly a spontaneous lapse in sanity, raised himself up and leaned over the gear stick to drop a kiss on Axel's cheek.

There was a moment of complete silence.

"Oh my God," Axel said finally. "Oh my _God_, did that really just happen? Tell me that didn't really just happen." He was evidently on the edge of a rib-fracturing laughing fit. "I'm sorry, did I fall asleep on the wheel because clearly I missed the part where my boyfriend swapped bodies with a twelve-year-old girl."

"Give me shit about it later, okay?" Roxas said with a grimace. "This is totally a big deal. I need every ounce of support I can get."

The exquisitely mean expression on Axel's face softened. "You can stop pouting now," he said, voice indulgent. "I get it, okay? Now go do your thing. I'll see you at Black Sheep afterward, as agreed."

"I still think we should have gone with Lone Wolf," Roxas said, just to be a giant tool.

"Maybe next time," Axel said affectionately, and practically shoved Roxas out of the car.

o0o

All in all, Roxas was feeling rather grateful for a lifetime's education in feeling awkward and out-of-place, because it had totally prepared him for the crushing humiliation that was rolling up in front of the school looking like a Depression-era tramp while everybody in a mile-wide radius was decked out to the nines in the best the local prom-slash-pageant boutiques had to offer. It was becoming clearer than ever that Axel was having an erroneous influence on him: the more time Roxas spent in his immediate company, the lower his grooming standards became, deplorable as they were.

He was distracted from this line of distressing thought by a brief flash of another familiar red-haired figure. Kairi was standing at a street corner, dressed in a pink, strapless gown of a full, shimmering material that, under the pale light of the street lamp, looked like it would feel really nice to the touch. Roxas craned his neck for a look, and saw that she was in medias a huddled conversation with Sora and Riku. Judging by the looks of things, Olette hadn't been the only one aiming to double-up the number of her JP escorts.

In a sudden fit of nosiness, Roxas surreptitiously ambled his way over, and as he did so, saw Kairi take a step back and give her friends a playful push, saying something to them in a low voice. Twin uncertain looks flitted across both boys' faces—Sora even opened his mouth to speak, but was silenced by Kairi's quelling hand. She leaned forward and hugged him briefly before stepping away again, giving Riku a firm nod. Granting permission of some kind.

By the time Riku and Sora were walking away from Kairi—Riku placing a tentative hand on Sora's back, sliding lower as they walked—Roxas had cleared the distance. He had a feeling he had walked in on a private moment, watching the lonely bow of Kairi's shoulders as she drew them into her chest, wrapping her thin arms around her ribs. Portrait of a girl left, for once, out of the trinity to which she had always belonged. Roxas felt a stab of epiphany regarding the nature of that little pantomime he'd just witnessed.

Roxas, despite crippling social anxiety, had what he fancied were chivalric tendencies, which were probably what made him clear his throat and say, "It's their loss."

Kairi wheeled around in surprise. "Roxas," she said. "That wasn't what you think—"

"Of course not," Roxas said quickly. "I was just, you know, trying to be funny. Sticking my tongue in my cheek. Guess I suck at it."

Kairi grinned at him. "This is the only chance they have," she explained. Her smile turned mischievous. "You know, before Riku chickens out again and runs away to college without breathing a word."

"For the record, I am totally filing that information away to use against him in the future," Roxas said.

Kairi laughed lightly. A few strands of her auburn hair had slipped out of their elegant knot, falling to frame her heart-shaped face. She was beautiful like that, light and unguarded, a milky, insubstantial light tracing the slim curve of her collarbones, the graceful arch of her neck. Her laugh was the open, capacious kind; it invited you in, made you want to get to know the girl behind the smile, made you want to smile back.

"Save the last dance for the loser who missed out on the Prom?"

He reached out one hand to Kairi, palm up in an internationally-recognized gesture, and even though he looked like something fished out of a dumpster and she was a Homecoming Queen in the making, she still took his proffered hand and allowed him to pull her into a clumsy spin that would have made Roxas's former ballroom dancing teacher cry. One hundred hours plus of lesson apparently only amounted to him managing to dip Kairi without dropping her headfirst on the pavement.

People were turning around to stare at them, whispering among themselves. Roxas ignored them, and spun Kairi again in a dizzying swirl of pink satin, her bright laughter melodious in the muggy night. Haters to the left. Like any of them would have a chance with a girl like her in a million years.

"There's my ride," Kairi said, slightly breathless, and tipped her head toward the opposite sidewalk, where a group of her cheer squad friends were waving at her from the back of a large Jeep.

"Have fun," Roxas said, releasing her hand. "Don't do anything I wouldn't do." Then again, considering all the sketchy activities he'd gotten up to in the past few days, this advice probably didn't carry as much weight as it might have once upon a simpler time.

Kairi gave him another crinkle-eyed smile, and squeezed his shoulder in solidarity before running over to her friends. Roxas rode that warm gooey feeling all the way back to the school entrance, arriving just in time to see Olette and Pence spill out the front door—Olette bright-eyed and lovely in a flowy orange silk number, Pence mildly uncomfortable in a rumpled powder blue tuxedo with a stiff collar that appeared to be choking his airway.

Really, Roxas reflected, he had no room to be judging Riku at all, because the mere sight of his friends and their identical ear-to-ear smiles was doing all sorts of scary things to his innards.

o0o

On the way to the coffee shop, Olette ran the gamut of a comprehensive range of emotions verbally translated to, "Oh my God," and, "How could you not tell me?" and, "Wait, did you try to tell me?" and finally, "_Oh my God, why did you not tell me?_" Pence just blinked away his initial wide-eyed amazement and busied himself with the task of tearing his shirt collar apart. Roxas couldn't help but feel a little irrationally insulted by that.

By the time they arrived at Black Sheep's storefront, Roxas was on the cusp of yet another attack of onset cowardice, and began to entertain the futile hope that the same ailment had befallen Axel and that he had backed out at the last minute. This was, of course, not to be, as he could clearly see Rosalina parked outside the café, her gleaming frame familiar and dear—reminding Roxas that what he should _really_ be worried about was the endlessly likelier possibility that Axel had returned to his asshole baseline and had shown up wearing Doc Martens and a ballet tutu over striped tights or something equally awful. He had yet to make any overtly mocking remark after learning via one shamefaced confession that he had, for the last few weeks, stood in as the default muse for Roxas's Ballad of the Fictional Girlfriend, but at this point, he'd be stupid to put anything past Axel.

Thankfully, Axel had refrained from any cross-dressing douchebaggery. The most questionable item of clothing he was sporting was the t-shirt under his fleece scarf that read, charmingly, I DON'T LIKE BUSH, I LIKE SHAVED. As usual, he was lounging vegetatively at a corner table radiating glazed affection at the jumbo cup of cocaine-laced Black Sheep coffee in front of him, looking like someone who had found his zen center and wasn't about to vacate it any time soon.

During the walk over, Roxas had spent a worrisome amount of time envisioning how this meeting was going to go, running through all the horrible outcomes his highly active imagination had cooked up, and yet for some reason, he had still failed to account for the unspeakable atrocity that actually unfolded.

Axel and Olette liked each other.

_Axel and Olette liked each other._

"Olette and Pence?" Axel said in a thoughtful voice Roxas was certain he had never before used. "You two must be really close with Roxas, huh?"

"Oh we are," Olette said, grinning. "We're his _best_ friends."

"Totally BFFs," Pence added dryly.

"Is that so?" Axel drawled, arching an eyebrow as he brought two fingers to his lips. Roxas tried not to look him in the eye. "Apparently, fickle Roxas here has many, many of those."

Olette nodded knowingly. "I think he just keeps up the loner act because he likes the attention."

"Hello?" Roxas asked, waving his hands in an impressive imitation of avian death throes. "Am I not still in the room?"

"Hush, baby," Axel said dulcetly. "Us girls are talking now, isn't that right, Olette?"

Olette muffled her laughter in one fist. "You know," she said, "you don't really look like an 'Anna'."

Roxas used every ounce of strength in his soul not to bolt for the door. Bloodshed of some kind was imminent. He sipped his organic green tea, and silently formulated a plan to pen an epically vindictive limerick titled Ode to an Eminently Canadian Young Woman to be anonymously distributed across the Amherst campus. The challenge was meshing the anapestic meter format with choice imageries such as "hair the color of autumn maple leaves" and "eyes like the Yukon Trail".

"Looks like I need a refill," Axel said, shaking his empty cup. "Does anyone else want anything while I'm up?"

"I'll come with you," Olette said—brightly, but sinisterly. "I want to take a look at those cupcakes."

At this point, Roxas ran out of question marks and despair, so he decided to just roll with the punches. He did not look up from his cup until he was certain Axel and Olette had left the table, at which point he found Pence staring at him intently.

"So," Roxas said, pointing vaguely at Pence's unfortunately colored suit. "The Junior Prom?"

"Yeah," Pence said wearily, fingering the wreck he'd made of his white bowtie. "Thanks a lot for bailing out on me, by the way. It was a lot of fun being on the receiving end of the resident star quarterback's death glare the entire night."

"Rai was there?" Roxas said. "Who'd he go with?"

"His friend Fuu. I'm pretty sure she only took him as a pity date. The guy _is_ pretty pitiful these days."

"Someone should tell Olette that before Fuu's name ends up on her list of people to destroy socially," Roxas said darkly. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that Olette had had Axel backed up against the pastry displaying case. She was looking rather feral. Roxas was deeply glad that he couldn't hear what they were talking about over the din of the coffee house, because there was a distressingly high chance that the conversation was of the And What Are Your Intentions Toward My Friend variety.

"Thanks for not making a big deal out of this whole thing," he told Pence. "It's actually kind of freaking me out how chill you're being about it."

"I wasn't really surprised, to be honest," Pence said. "You were always pretty questionable with your strangely sexual fascination with T.S. Eliot." He smirked at Roxas's rude gesture, and added, "Have you told your family yet?"

Roxas sighed. "I'm working myself up to it. I think I'll test drive on Hayner first. On a scale of one to disastrous, how badly do you think that'll go?"

"You're such a drama queen," Pence said. "As long as you have Olette and her unholy powers backing you, I'm sure you'll be golden. If you require even more handholding, I'll be glad to continue lending my wise guidance in this time of your sensitive need."

"Right," Roxas said. "That's it. That's exactly what I want. You as my designated life coach. My cruise director for the rest of it all."

Pence shrugged. "Well, if you want to _stay_ in the closet, I have no real objection to that either. I'm starting to think that if you retain your chick magnet status until graduation, there might be some fringe benefits in it for me. I fully believe in the trickledown effect."

Roxas rolled his eyes. "I never had that status until Olette started spreading onerous lies about my love life in the girls' locker room. And that term doesn't mean what you think it means. Reaganomics is a lie."

"Lies indeed," Pence said, stirring his coffee solemnly. "The descriptions you fed me were way, _way_ off. We totally agreed on classic redhead, and Axel's not that at all. He's really more… the exotic type."

"I will kill you with this mug," Roxas said. "Seriously, you're the first on my list."

o0o

"That actually went a lot better than I expected," Roxas mused as Rosalina rolled to a stop at the corner of East Street.

"Told you Axel Knows Best," said Axel. He braked the bike, and pulled off his helmet, shaking out his flattened hair. "The truly amazing part is how a freak like you managed to score such sweet little friends."

"Seriously, do you even hear yourself talk?" Roxas said. "What was it like when you first came out to _your_ friends?"

"What friends?" Axel said. "Well, there _was_ this one guy who got all weird and judgmental about it, all because of one _harmless little kiss_ in the mall. He's kind of an anal-retentive dick, that guy. Name starts with an R, you might know him."

"I'm sure he had his reasons," Roxas soothed.

Axel looked thoughtful for a moment. He raised his eyes, and said, "I don't want to jinx everything, so don't take this the wrong way, but—are you really okay?"

"What are you talking about?" Roxas said, frowning.

"It's just that trying to get through to you all this time has been like pulling teeth, but now all of a sudden you seem to be pretty cool with the way everything went down. You took to this idea suspiciously fast."

Roxas smirked. "What can I say? You're just something of an acquired taste."

"Fuck you," Axel said wryly. "I'm serious."

"So was I," Roxas said, and pretended to dodge when Axel made as though to box his ear. He sobered up in time to say, "Well, it's like, you know, how sometimes you spend a long time resisting something, and by the time you finally give in, you kind of forget why you were fighting it so much to begin with?"

"I don't know anything about that," Axel asserted with confidence. "I _never_ give in."

"I'll bet," Roxas said, smiling slightly. Giving in wasn't so bad. Sometimes.

"You know," Axel began, low and tense, "I could kill you."

"_What?_" Roxas squeaked. An irrational twinge of panic shot through him like a bolt—obviously those dark criminal suspicions from the early days had never quite dissipated.

"For today," Axel clarified, in a way that managed to explain exactly nothing. "What I mean is, I haven't forgotten the long, ridiculously detailed list of reasons why this wouldn't work that you gave me last night on the drive up. Granted, none of those reasons made any damn sense, but you still gave them. And then you turned around and took it all back, just like that."

Roxas felt his ears burn. It took an astronomical amount of effort to keep his head still, but he couldn't look away. Visible guilt was a sign of weakness in the animal kingdom.

Axel continued to stare darkly into the distance. Then he shrugged and said, "But it's okay, you know. I know it's because you're so young. It's in your blood to be fickle and wanton."

"Please," Roxas said with immense relief. "There are grade-schoolers more emotionally mature than you." Baby steps, right. Just watch for the bumps in the road as they came.

"So, um," he said awkwardly. "Guess I'll see you later?"

"You sure?" Axel said, eyes gleaming. "Don't want to drive up to the top of the hill and make this a night to remember or anything?"

Roxas immediately snapped his mouth shut. His entire head was starting to feel like a nuclear power plant on the verge of critical meltdown—but only for a minute, because right then the sound of Axel's awful braying laughter galloped in and saved him from probably hemorrhaging something out of anxiety.

"Please, Goldilocks, don't flatter yourself. You haven't showered, your clothes reek, your hair is matted sideway, and your breath smells like a public latrine. Even I don't have the testicular fortitude to go there."

"You know, I think I'm starting to lose that acquired taste," Roxas snapped. Before he could stomp away, however, Axel had reached out and reeled him in by the front of his shirt. His breaths came warm and fast on Roxas's cheek. He felt only half-awake, feverish, and there were at least a dozen reasons why this couldn't work, he was well-acquainted with them all and shouldn't even try. This might just be another disaster in the making, but Axel's lips were soft and wet at the corner of his mouth, long fingers curled into the hair at the back of Roxas's neck, and somehow that made it seem alright.

"Well, goodnight," Axel said easily, ending the sudsy moment. As he sped away on his scooter, he looked over his shoulder at Roxas and shouted, "There's always next year, baby! By my decree, Cinderella, you shall go to the Prom!"

Roxas put his face in his hand. He could only hope that his neighbors were deep sleepers.

By the time he managed to unlock his front door and drag himself into the foyer, Roxas came to the realization that he was clinically dead on his feet, everything hair down numb and leaden. The house was cool and dark, wrapping its roomy hush around him like a soothing blanket. He staggered down the hallway and up the stairs without bothering to turn on the lights, allowing sense memory to guide his steps, and before he peeled off his clothes and fell into bed in a dead faint, spared just enough time to remember that, pretty soon, his entire family would be under the same roof again.

Really, he couldn't wait.

o0o

There were a million and one things Roxas should be doing on Sunday, most of which involved cleaning out the cluttered house in preparation for Naminé's homecoming, but early Sunday afternoon instead saw him loitering on the sidewalk outside a certain Amherst dormitory. There were simply no limits as to how pathetic he allowed himself to get these days.

"Is that you, Abercrombie Kid?"

Some part of Roxas _jerked_, like his viscera had developed a Pavlovian response to the sound of that voice. He dully reminded himself that running for his life was not an option, and sucked in a long breath before turning around to face Larxene and her scary, drink-lacing smile.

She was sitting behind the wheel of a gorgeous onyx Bentley, and Roxas had to take a moment to boggle at the students of this school and their conspicuous consumption. Seriously, what was up with this unnatural bubble-like upper-crust existence? Suddenly he understood his father's obstinate need to drive Ford Tauruses and stick it to The Man—even though, technically speaking, Roxas's dad _was_ The Man.

"Not even second base," Larxene said, eyes flashing like the predator she was. "That's pathetic. And I gave you my best mix, too, what a waste."

"In some places, people can press charges for that," Roxas pointed out.

"I was just trying to do you a favor," said Larxene. "Judging by the fact that you're skulking out here at this hour of the day, I'd say that I made a good call. But be careful now—with prolonged exposure, the crazy might get on your pretty face." She blew him a disdainful kiss, and then threw her car into reverse, leaving Roxas behind in a cloud of perfumed dust.

In the hallway, he ran into Zexion, who was armed with coffee and his laptop case and therefore was evidently on his way to the sim lab. On a Sunday.

"I heard from Axel," Zexion said. "I'm glad to hear that your sister's alright. Send her my best."

"Thanks," Roxas said with a smile. "So Demyx stayed over last night?"

This wasn't a real question, as he'd already passed the communal bathroom on his way in—Demyx was apparently a sing-in-the-shower kind of guy. He really knew how to carry a note.

"And you're here to see Axel," Zexion replied coolly. "You might want to watch your step in there. We're moving out, so the place's kind of a mess."

But in fact the common room did not look like any kind of mess whatsoever, the walls lined with boxes neatly stacked and labeled in a clear, erudite hand that could only be Zexion's. Axel's room, when Roxas entered, did admittedly resemble war-torn Bosnia, half-packed cardboard boxes covering nearly every inch of the floor—including one filled with what appeared to be mini versions of the homemade rocket he and Axel had set off back in April. Where had those been hiding during Roxas's last visit? Clearly he hadn't looked closely enough for signs of the crazy.

"Go sit on the bed before you trip over something potentially hazardous," Axel said seriously. His hair was pulled back from his face, and he was wearing a scruffy white t-shirt that said I CAN'T AFFORD TO HEART NY, probably because he wanted to cause Roxas _mental pain_.

Almost in spite of himself, Roxas tilted his head to look at the ceiling, and was slightly startled to find that all the postcards were gone. Further inspection revealed that they were piled into a small box sitting at the foot of the bed. Without these colorful accoutrements, the spiraling quote looked strangely bereft, a black, ungainly flotsam all swallowed up in a sea of white.

_Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt._

"I like that quote too," Roxas said.

"What?" Axel said distractedly. He followed Roxas's gaze. "Oh, _that_. Yeah, I might have been a little drunk when I put that up there."

"Where'd you first read it?"

"I saw it spray-painted on a men's room wall in some nightclub in… I think this was like, San Francisco. The Castro, maybe. Anyway, it caught my eye. Cool, huh?"

"It's Vonnegut. He was on my high school reading list, freshman year."

Axel blinked at him. "Are you for real? I don't actually remember most of my high school years, but I'm still pretty sure we never had to read shit like that."

"Yeah, well, maybe things are different _up north_. You also didn't go to Collegiate on the Upper West Side, so count your blessings."

"Figures," Axel said, and went back to sorting clothes. "Somehow I always knew you were a poor little rich boy. Say, you never did any of that crazy Gossip Girl shit, didja? You just never know with you quiet types…"

Roxas pulled a pained expression. "Every day, I discover something else about you that kills me a little bit inside," he said, and almost in the same breath, blurted out, "Why'd you choose me?"

Axel whipped around and stared at him incredulously. "Jesus Christ. It's only been two days, and you're trying to back out of this _already_?" He dragged a hand over his face in a manner Roxas found to be needlessly melodramatic. "Roxas, listen, I haven't even had _coffee_ yet. It is way too early in the morning for this shit."

"You're full of lies," Roxas said, pointing out the paper cup sitting on one of corner of the desk. "It's one in the afternoon, and you've clearly been up for awhile." He paused for a moment, and added, "And this is not a meltdown, I promise. I'm asking you seriously. I—I really need to know."

"Know what, exactly?"

"Why _me?_ Do you just enjoy making things difficult for yourself?"

Axel pointed a finger at his face. "Hey, don't try to pin your neuroses on me." He rolled his eyes, and went on, "Though, since you asked, you could say that I tend to selectively veer toward the challenging cases."

"Because you're a masochist?"

"Maybe it's more about making sure whatever you're going for is really worth all the trouble."

"So you're saying if I were easy you'd immediately lose interest?" Roxas said skeptically.

Axel made a face. He jabbed his finger at Roxas with greater emphasis, stopping just short of squashing his nose. "Believe me, _easy_ is not a word that comes to mind when I think about you." He stopped, and shrugged lightly. "But I don't know, that's sort of the charm. Just think of that saying, goes something like 'I don't want to join any club that would have me for a member.'"

"That's Groucho Marx, and the line's actually…"

"Really? I thought that was from _Annie Hall_."

Roxas's mind reeled for a moment. Was this how it was going to be? Would their relationship be forever plagued by association with relentlessly neurotic rom-coms?

"It is," he soldiered on. "But see, Woody was _quoting_ Groucho, who might have been quoting Freud. What he said was…"

"That it was the key joke of his adult life in terms of his relationships with women? Yeah, I remember. Wow. Cheerful stuff."

At this point, Roxas recognized the dull aches he had started experiencing for what they were—pangs of remorse. If this was going to work out in any shape or form that wasn't complete dysfunction, he was going to have to do something he had never before attempted in his life: he was going to have to _try_.

"Well," he began contritely, and decided that sounded passable. "It's a great movie, but that doesn't mean we should use it as a primer for relationships or anything."

"Yeah, especially given what we've already agreed on regarding _scripts_," Axel said. "But we can reenact the scene with the lobsters sometime, if you'd like."

At a temporary loss for words, Roxas let his eyes wander, and almost immediately found himself looking at the box of postcards—like he was always searching out for them. Perhaps when Axel moved into his new lodging, wherever that was, he might let Roxas help tape them up again. Idly, he picked one out of the box at random. Nova Scotia. Instead of writing, the card had a single curl of gold hair taped to it.

"Why postcards?" he asked, fingering the lock of hair. Tragic attraction to small, bossy blondes indeed.

"What's with you and all the questions today?" Axel said. "I used to have a Polaroid camera, but I broke it fighting off a mugger in Rio. Then I figured, why take my own pictures when I could buy them and contribute to the tourism industry."

"That sounds so wrong coming from your mouth," said Roxas. "And you really see yourself as a tourist? Do you have a fanny pack too?"

"Why? You want me to model it for you?"

"I'd rather sandpaper my eyeballs. So have you really been to all these places?"

Axel laughed. "Are you crazy? Do I look like I'm made of money?" He bent down and rifled through the stacks of postcards. "Look, most of these are still blank—and that's because I _plan on_ eventually going to all these places. Once I'm there, I'll give the card to a local and ask them to mail it back to me, and that way I get the postmark too. It's totally fucking genius."

In the smallest voice his mind could manage, Roxas had to admit to himself that it was, in fact, kind of genius. Surely he'd get over the shock any day now.

"So where are you staying this summer?" he asked, just to have something to say.

Axel made an indistinct gesture at the air. "Demyx asked me to housesit for him while he's off being a bleeding-heart psycho in Cambodia or whatever." Demyx, Roxas decided, was a terminal masochist. "I just need a dumping ground for all my shit—I'm gonna spend the summer on the road too. Trying to hit some of those landmarks in my collection, right?"

"Yeah," Roxas said glumly. His own summer held engaging prospects such as taking standardized tests and drafting college essays. With his spotty records, he knew he needed all the application padding he could get, but he was still seventeen and it still sucked a whole bunch.

Axel cocked his head, and gave Roxas a considering look. As though reading his mind, he said, "Hey. Maybe—someday—you could come along with me on one of these trips, yeah? No marriage certifications required, I promise."

Roxas smiled back at him. "That'd be nice." Frankly, if there were one place he would like to visit, it was a certain mystical land up north known as Toronto, setting of The Cunning Man, a Canadian cipher shrouded in mystery that Axel had spoken of in tones alternately reproachful and besotted.

"You bet," Axel said, grinning and loose and relaxed. He reached over his shoulder and pulled off his t-shirt, tossing it onto the pile of dirty laundry he'd just finished sorting out. The light from the window glanced and caught the faint sheen of sweat on Axel's chest. Roxas's mouth went a little dry.

"You ever noticed how girls take off their shirts from the front, but guys pull theirs off by the back of the neck?" he said, flicking his tongue slowly over his bottom lip.

"What?" Axel asked, bewildered. A glint of interest flared in his eyes. He placed one hand on his hip, sliding his fingers over the smooth bone peeking out of his waistband, skimming the light trail of hair on his lower belly. "Seen a lot of girls take off their shirts, have you?"

Roxas smirked, and pulled Axel in by his endearingly crooked wrists, fully intending to show him exactly how much he knew about the fine and subtle art of shirt-removal.

o0o

Exactly three weeks from the day Olette had marched into the cafeteria and set into motion a chain of events that would ultimately change his life, Roxas found himself walking to school without feeling, for once, like a hunted animal. His head felt light in the softness of June, and he was thinking of sunny days and having Naminé home for the summer. She would probably like Amherst, like the quiet, tree-lined streets and pretty storefronts, and maybe when she'd had time to settle in he would take her out to the Dickinson Homestead, to the cemetery to find Emily's grave and lay a pebble on her tombstone.

In his heart, Roxas knew that it was far from over—just the previous night, he had sat up until two in the morning perusing the National Multiple Sclerosis Society's website, bookmarking links and looking up information on how to care for MS sufferers. To say that their family had had a rough couple of years would be an understatement of the criminal kind. He had to be ready, had to keep his head above water. _Before I could raise my Heart from one, another has come. _

But for now, the grin on his mouth felt right and perfect where it was, and he knew better than to mess with a good thing.

On the steps of the entrance, Roxas saw Pence. His face held that blurry, owlish look that meant he had spent the entire night coding again and fallen asleep on his keyboard around five in the morning. Roxas knew Pence was probably on Google's shortlist or something, but if he kept this up, no hypothetical amount of trickledown popularity from Roxas could possibly get him through senior year in one piece.

"Is the binary numeral system the new language of lovers?" Roxas asked sweetly.

Pence shot him a dirty look. "Good morning to you too, jerk face," he said—and that was about all he managed to get out before a hulkish blur tackled him flat, screaming, "I'm gonna rip your head off, motherfucker! Stay the hell away from my girlfriend!"

By the time someone thought to fetch Olette, Roxas had already sustained an elbow to the ribs in a heroic attempt to pull Rai off of Pence. As Olette strode into the fray yelling about how stupid they were and how she was going to kill each of them dead and then learn black magic to resurrect them just so she could kill them _again_, he helped Pence to his feet, and reflected that, really, he should have known the cycle of pain would have just begun afresh.

For some obscure and difficult to explain reason, Olette did not seem at all offended by her ex's attempted assault on her supposed best friend. She was, as a matter of fact, rather taken by his action, and the Great and Terrible Olette-Rai Rift finally came to an end, to the vast relief of the general populace.

"I'm sure she'll give him hell for it later," Roxas consoled Pence, once Olette and Rai had scurried off to do whatever reconciliation-related things that heterosexual people did.

Pence snorted. "I wouldn't bet on it." He wiped at his bleeding lip, and said, "Do you think any girls saw me sock him in the eye back there?"

"Dozens," Roxas said facetiously. He had, in fact, seen Rai's Prom date Fuu send a mildly impressed look Pence's way when he'd got in his one lucky punch, so maybe it wasn't all in vain.

He knew life had completely returned to normal when he walked into homeroom and found Hayner slumped over his desk, wearing an ominous expression that only an early morning encounter of the Seifer-kind could have engendered. Pence was still making proud noises about his latest display of masculine brawn, and when Olette whirled through the door a few minutes later, humming a cheerful tune under her breath, Roxas found it difficult to believe that so much had changed.

And right on cue, his phone began belting Katamari on the Rocks at him.

SEVEN PERCENT OF AMERICANS DON'T KNOW THE FIRST 9 WORDS OF THE AMERICAN ANTHEM BUT KNOW THE FIRST 7 OF THE CANADIAN ANTHEM.

Roxas snorted. He scrolled to the bottom for the usual pictorial depiction, but then almost snapped his phone in half when he saw what Axel had sent. Somehow, he'd always known that he would one day take up with a ravening pervert. (But he'd save that picture for later, more private perusal anyway.)

While waiting for the teacher to show up, Roxas decided once and for all that a) he _really_ needed to find a less obnoxious ringtone, and b) even if he couldn't yet take Axel up on his offer to take Roxas far and far away, that did not mean that they weren't allowed to take field trips every now and then. In fact, he knew just the place.

With a smirk wide enough to break his face, Roxas flipped out his phone again and began punching in a new message.

_how do you feel about muppets and musical theater?_

o0o

**THE END

* * *

**

**The Last A/N Evar: **And that's it. The end. It took over three years, but I've finally made it here - I could sob right now. I'd like to thank everyone for your fantastic patience and support. I totally understand how frustrating it must have been to wait on me at times, especially if you're one of the very few unfortunate souls who've been around since day one. In a way, the end of this fic also serves as a coda of sorts to my time in Kingdom Hearts fandom. I started writing it right after posting my first KH fic, and now it's all grown up and going to college :( I'm still going to be around, but it's probably sort of obvious at this point that KH (and Axel/Roxas) isn't where my main interest lies these days.

Then again, you never know ;)**  
**


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